As the title of the topic says. I’ve never really thought of this before, but for a blender game, at what point would you say “this thing is too damn big, no way am I downloading it!”
80mb is my limit for a game. That is compressed. Uncompressed I don’t care.
Making an indie game that size is a huge undertaking. If your game is over ~150mb then you can probably cut filesize somewhere without sacrificing quality.
Small things, like png and jpg (on max quality) are indistinguishable from the much higher file-size tga’s
WAV’s are huge, oggs are smaller, and I can’t tell the difference.
Sloppy modelling, and bad use of image textures can also lead to huge file-sizes, as can failiing to use instances of objects/meshes.
There are thousands of ways of reducing file-size.
Compress the game and redistribute it.
Around 500 MB should be good to go.
As small as possible.
I would like to say around 100 bytes. To be realistic - this would be strange ;).
I really do not want to download a simple puzzle game with 20 MB. A complex game can be larger. As a cheese-paring person I would not even download 50 MB for any Blender game without a very good reason (e.g. en explanation why it is that huge).
This is less of download time or disk space. It is more: If someone wastes a lot of space, it is more than likely a bad designed game anyway.
I would accept larger games when:
- it contains a lot of game content (levels, models etc.)
- the game is not just a one minute tech demo
This means you should not include a 200MB intro movie. I could watch it at youtube ;).
I do not want to download a 4096x4096 uncompressed tree texture, for trees with an high of 300 Pixels.
Backed shadows? Cool but wasting MBs of disk-space and melting my GPU is not the point of a game. There are other methods. The results might do not look that good but you are an artist, aren’t you? Just hide the ugly parts ;).
Game development is always a balance between:
- authors vision
- play-ability
- visual quality (including visual consistence)
- speed
- size
- development costs (time and money)
- maintainability
- extend-ability
maybe more
For me it depends strongly on the quality of the game.
If you somehow manage to create a game comparable to the ones you can actually buy from professional game studios I would be willing to download several GB.
If it’s only a simple game (with wasted ressources) I wouldnt download more than 20MB.
It really does depend on the quality of the game, if I’m downloading a quality game through a reputable publisher or a successful and popular game with a good track record I would be OK with a CD sized download.
If its an unproven game from an independent author or unknown publisher I wouldn’t download and run it on my machine at all, unless its very intriguing and will run inside of virtualbox.