Game Download Sizes

[Karl]

Why do some games have a download size a lot smaller than their size on disk while others don't?

[cinedine]

Because downloads are compressed.

[Karl]

Originally posted by cinedine:

Because downloads are compressed.

Wish more were compressed only a few games in my library are like that. Also, is there any way of telling which are compressed and which are not?

[nullable]

It's a design choice. Compressing files saves space, but makes them slower to read as they need to be uncompressed first when they're accessed.

[cinedine]

Originally posted by Karl:

Originally posted by cinedine:

Because downloads are compressed.

Wish more were compressed only a few games in my library are like that. Also, is there any way of telling which are compressed and which are not?

All of them are. It's just that some files will result in smaller results than others.
There is a well known malicious ZIP file that is just 42 kB in size but the completely uncompressed data is 4 PB.

[Karl]

Well, more compression means less download time, and that's very important to me. Download speeds are very low where I live.

[Cathulhu]

How good a file can be compressed depends on the file, some are more compressable than others.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Karl:

Originally posted by cinedine:

Because downloads are compressed.

Wish more were compressed only a few games in my library are like that. Also, is there any way of telling which are compressed and which are not?

You can't. because you're essentially asking "how long is a piece of string?"

The fact is that not all games are the same - coding varies greatly, even amongst similar genres of games. Also, different data compresses really well, others don't.

Typically, I've noticed racing games that I've compressed in the past compress REALLY well, as the track data is obviously something that can be nicely compressed. But other things, like wildly varied and unrepeated data (music for example) does not. So you might have a racing game that could be compressed down to 30% of it's actual size, but something else might only get compressed to about 90%.

So you can never know because there is no standard answer or metric here.

On top of this, its' prudent to remember WHY it's done this way. All Steam games are compressed to some degree (to assist in storage and downloads), and encrypted too (for security). This is why there's many downloads that stop and start (or appear to).

But you will never be able to get to a point where things get nicely and tightly compressed to save any real huge amounts of space or bandwidth. If you could, it would be done already.