Some games are clearly inefficient, but others are just making a more extreme optimization that makes one part relatively bloated. From a game development persp

Some games are clearly inefficient, but others are just making a more extreme optimization that makes one part relatively bloated. From a game development perspective, the ranking of value goes something like: frame time > startup/load time > download/install time/space > release build time/space Different teams have different levels of aggressiveness in pushing operations down this slope, and different projects have different demands as well. If you're not trying to render much in the first place, maybe frame time isn't actually scarce and you don't have much to gain by doing a ton of precalculation at load time. Conversely, if you're working on a AAA shooter that's struggling to hit 60 FPS and you figure out that you can shave a couple milliseconds off frame time by reorganizing the asset files in a way that makes updates 1 GB instead of 100 MB, that's an opportunity you can't afford to pass up.