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might be a form of Jevons Paradox
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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I still remember playing StarCraft 2 shortly after release on a 300$ laptop and it running perfectly well on medium settings.
Looked amazing. Felt incredibly responsive. Polished. Optimized.
Nowadays it’s RTX this, framegen that, need SSD or loading times are abysmal, oh and don’t forget that you need 40gb of storage and 32gb of ram for a 3 hour long walking simulator, how about you optimize your goddamn game instead? Don’t even get me started on price tags for these things.
Software and game development is definitely a spectrum though, but holy shit is the ratio of sloppy releases so disproportionate that it’s hard to see it at times.
StarCraft 2 was released in 2007, and a quick search indicates the most common screen resolution was 1024x768 that year. That feels about right, anyway. A bit under a million pixels to render.
A modern 4K monitor has a bit over eight million pixels, slightly more than ten times as much. So you'd expect the textures and models to be about ten times the size. But modern games don't just have 'colour textures', they're likely to have specular, normal and parallax ones too, so that's another three times. The voice acting isn't likely to be in a single language any more either, so there'll be several copies of all the sound files.
A clean Starcraft 2 install is a bit over 20 GB. 'Biggest' game I have is Baldur's Gate 3, which is about 140 GB, so really just about seven times as big. That's quite good, considering how much game that is!
I do agree with you. I can't think of a single useful feature that's been added to eg. MS Office since Office 97, say, and that version is so tiny and fast compared to the modern abomination. (In fact, in a lot of ways it's worse - has had some functionality removed and not replaced.) And modern AAA games do focus too much on shiny and not enough on gameplay, but the fact that they take a lot more resources is more to do with our computers being expected to do a lot more.
Why are you comparing the most common screen resolution in 2007 to a 4k monitor today? 4k isn't the most common today. This isn't a fair comparison.
1080p is still the most common, though is 1440p is catching up very fast
BTW the demand for bigger screens and bigger resolutions is something I don't easily understand. I notice some difference between 1366x768 and 1920x1080 on a desktop, but the difference from further increase is of so little use for me I'd classify it as a form of bloat. If anything, I now habitually switch to downloading 480p and 720p instead of higher definition by default because it saves me traffic and battery power, and fits much more on a single disk easy to back up.
the main thing I noticed with a 768p monitor was gnome being unusable thanks to their poor ui density
Not at all. For example, Rimworld saves all the map and world data in one big XML (which is bad btw, don't do that): about 2 million lines @75 MB, for a 30-pawns mid-game colony.
So you see, Data is not what uses space. But what uses space instead is, if you don't properly re-use objects/textures (so called "assets"), or even copy and repack the same assets per level/map, because that saves dev time.
Ark Survival Evolved, with "only" about 100 GB requirement, was known as a unoptimized mess back then.
Witcher 3 mod "HD Reworked Next-Gen" has barely 20 GB with 4k textures and high-res meshes. And you can't say that Witcher 3 is not a vibrant and big open world game.
Then factorio dev blog comes in and spend months optimizing the tok of one broken gear in the conveyor belt to slightly improve efficiency.
Tbf, there's saves there that efficiency increase means a lot
It's the only game I have that will actually recover from when it hangs and freezes and then go back to working fine.
Comparing a 20 year old game with FMV sequences at 1080p is certainly a take 🤣.
Absolutely. Every time I play a game from before 2016 or so it runs butter smooth and looks even better than modern games in many cases. I don't know what we're doing nowadays.