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> To give you a scope of the problem of game assets, "small" indie games like Stardew Valley or Terraria are close to 500MB. How on earth are you going to deplo

> To give you a scope of the problem of game assets, "small" indie games like Stardew Valley or Terraria are close to 500MB. How on earth are you going to deploy that on the web? Someone watching YouTube videos is sucking down hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour: the higher-resolution the video the more bandwidth required. Most video game assets require less bandwidth (megabytes per minute of consumption time), and can be cached locally. When designing games for the web, creators will have clear incentive to apply more aggressive compression to everything they send over the wire and figure out how to make do with smaller assets, to cut bandwidth. Games designed to be downloaded have a relaxed size budget and can afford plenty of inessential bloat.

kllrnohj 5y ago
> Someone watching YouTube videos is sucking down hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour: the higher-resolution the video the more bandwidth required. Most video game assets require less bandwidth (megabytes per minute of consumption time), and can be cached locally. This is completely incorrect. Games regularly saturate and are limited by the 80-100MB/s that can be streamed from a PS4 or Xbone hard drive. This is in fact the biggest differentiating feature of next gen consoles - the switch to NVME and even streaming directly from disk to the GPU, bypassing the CPU bottleneck. Meanwhile YouTube video, and indeed most streaming video, is well under 10MB/s. Netflix is even content to only recommend 25mbit/s for 4k HDR content. > Games designed to be downloaded have a relaxed size budget and can afford plenty of inessential bloat. This is such an arrogant and asinine statement. Games already exclusively ship highly compressed assets. They aren't just pissing away storage space for the lulz, and if they only tried a little harder could somehow cut sizes to 1/1000th of what they are today. Especially not to satisfy the needs of a platform that provides nothing but problems and headaches. You can't simultaneously claim that WASM and WebGPU will enable a new era of high quality web based games while just entirely ignoring all the actual problems with shipping games on the web. Which WASM and WebGPU literally solve none of the issues. WebGL2 is already competitive on feature set and capabilities with mobile, and yet casual web games are still largely dead - a regression from the flash era, even.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  >> YouTube videos is sucking down hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour > This is completely incorrect. [...] YouTube video, and indeed most streaming video, is well under 10MB/s. 10 MB/s is the same as 36 GB/hour. So we are in agreement. But what game uses more than 36 GB of assets for 1 hour of play? I can’t imagine that is at all common. What kind of assets are they shipping that use that much data?
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    You don't understand what the phrase "well under" means, do you? It means less than. Videos use less than 10MB/s. Netflix estimates 1-7GB per hour. Games need to load that much data in under a minute. Games don't stream data over an hour, they need to load a world instantly and can then stream in things you don't see. It's those bursts that matter, as that's what players are stuck waiting on to complete before they can get back to playing. Think of it as if video keyframes were 1GB. Video streaming wouldn't exist in such a world as nobody is going to watch a loading spinner for 20 minutes. No, it'd all be a world of pre-fetched, downloaded content. Which unsurprisingly is exactly how game stores & consoles work. Here's some coverage of the storage architecture of new consoles and why it's such a big upgrade: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps5-new-era-of-gaming https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps... Trying to shove lazy asset loading over the internet into that picture just doesn't work.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      > Netflix estimates 1-7GB per hour. Yes, and my estimate was “hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour”. So apparently Netflix also agrees with me. > Games need to load that much data in under a minute. This is based on design decisions from the programmers, not some kind of iron law of nature. Obviously you can’t just drop a game designed for one set of constraints into an entirely different context without change and expect it to work precisely the same way.
      - kllrnohj 5y ago

kllrnohj 5y ago

> Someone watching YouTube videos is sucking down hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour: the higher-resolution the video the more bandwidth required. Most video game assets require less bandwidth (megabytes per minute of consumption time), and can be cached locally. This is completely incorrect. Games regularly saturate and are limited by the 80-100MB/s that can be streamed from a PS4 or Xbone hard drive. This is in fact the biggest differentiating feature of next gen consoles - the switch to NVME and even streaming directly from disk to the GPU, bypassing the CPU bottleneck. Meanwhile YouTube video, and indeed most streaming video, is well under 10MB/s. Netflix is even content to only recommend 25mbit/s for 4k HDR content. > Games designed to be downloaded have a relaxed size budget and can afford plenty of inessential bloat. This is such an arrogant and asinine statement. Games already exclusively ship highly compressed assets. They aren't just pissing away storage space for the lulz, and if they only tried a little harder could somehow cut sizes to 1/1000th of what they are today. Especially not to satisfy the needs of a platform that provides nothing but problems and headaches. You can't simultaneously claim that WASM and WebGPU will enable a new era of high quality web based games while just entirely ignoring all the actual problems with shipping games on the web. Which WASM and WebGPU literally solve none of the issues. WebGL2 is already competitive on feature set and capabilities with mobile, and yet casual web games are still largely dead - a regression from the flash era, even.

jacobolus 5y ago
>> YouTube videos is sucking down hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour > This is completely incorrect. [...] YouTube video, and indeed most streaming video, is well under 10MB/s. 10 MB/s is the same as 36 GB/hour. So we are in agreement. But what game uses more than 36 GB of assets for 1 hour of play? I can’t imagine that is at all common. What kind of assets are they shipping that use that much data?
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  You don't understand what the phrase "well under" means, do you? It means less than. Videos use less than 10MB/s. Netflix estimates 1-7GB per hour. Games need to load that much data in under a minute. Games don't stream data over an hour, they need to load a world instantly and can then stream in things you don't see. It's those bursts that matter, as that's what players are stuck waiting on to complete before they can get back to playing. Think of it as if video keyframes were 1GB. Video streaming wouldn't exist in such a world as nobody is going to watch a loading spinner for 20 minutes. No, it'd all be a world of pre-fetched, downloaded content. Which unsurprisingly is exactly how game stores & consoles work. Here's some coverage of the storage architecture of new consoles and why it's such a big upgrade: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps5-new-era-of-gaming https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps... Trying to shove lazy asset loading over the internet into that picture just doesn't work.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    > Netflix estimates 1-7GB per hour. Yes, and my estimate was “hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour”. So apparently Netflix also agrees with me. > Games need to load that much data in under a minute. This is based on design decisions from the programmers, not some kind of iron law of nature. Obviously you can’t just drop a game designed for one set of constraints into an entirely different context without change and expect it to work precisely the same way.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago