• Doug [he/him]@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    And readily available resources. No need to put effort into space saving tricks when space is so easy to come by

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      Plus downloadability. If you don’t plan to play a game for a while, you can delete it and free up space, and have the ability to download it later.

      Plus, expandable storage. If a player wants more space, I think that everything out there today is expandable, even consoles, without replacing existing storage. If, say, 10% of the player base wants to keep a larger library downloaded than their console’s internal storage can handle, and the base console doesn’t have enough space, they can just throw another USB drive on the system.

      I guess maybe for portable devices, it could be obnoxious to carry the storage around.

        • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          If by nuts you mean, a very modest low single digit terabyte range. Which, according to the game sizes cited in the article could only hold around 6-10 games per terabyte. Given the way games tend to disappear from online sources over time, that doesn’t seem like enough space to me to really keep all those digital purchases. I guess if most of them will become abandonware eventually anyway when the companies shut down their servers, it hardly matters.

          • Doug [he/him]@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            Yes, that’s nuts. I used to be very happy to have less than one and a half megs on something wider than a deck of cards. Now you’re talking about terabytes on something the size of a pinky fingernail. I could store a half dozen in a pocket in my wallet without noticing them. That’s a lot of storage.

            For the record, only 6-10 games is also about 5-10 games more than I could store on one of those floppies, and if it was one it was an old game. It’d be akin to putting Halo: CE (not remastered or anything, original) on a micro SD.

            So, yeah, storage is plentiful and readily available.

            • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, I remember. My favorite DOS game was Scorched Earth, which fit on a high density 1.44MB floppy disk. But that was the point of the article. Space used to be at a premium and a terabyte used to feel like more space than I’d ever need. Now a terabyte is only just enough for portable devices because the cost of extra capacity was increasing so fast and development of space saving tech seemed like a waste of time, but that trend of increasing capacity and decreasing cost has significantly plateaued (as shown by the graph in the article).