Most accurate description of single player offline

Same. Besides, it will probably only act as a vehicle to sell GTA: Online, more precisely, shark cards. To me, this isn't more than already shipping the assets for GTA:O. They showed that they don't care about singleplayer. Not a single SP DLC came for 5, can't even use all the GTA:O cars in SP w/o a trainer.

why is their shovelware os 200ish gb

Likely around 280-300 gigs. Most games don't unpack their files nowadays. They decompress them on the fly.

So the install size tends to not be that much bigger then the download.

Even still that's like a third of a ps5s storage iirc

If they unpack things more for the pc release tho... It could readily balloon to almost a terabyte if they wanted to be assholes.

Add to that the fact that they all need SSD's so whatever HDD storage you have is useless now.

Ugh, installing World of Xeen was tough. Needed to free up a whopping 50 MB of space or so. But at least the install of Darkside of Xeen had some dancing stick figures you could look at while swapping floppies.

Given prices of hardware these days devs should definitely be better at this.

They throw in massive poly count models with high resolution textures and ever bigger game worlds, then (on PC) let you scale down the quality.

Only real solution is having high res textures as a separate download which some games do but if the console can handle them anyway, there's less reason, compared to PC where you might have a lower end graphics card that can't handle 4K textures anyway

On consoles, developers still duplicate assets for HDD optimization (faster loading, more storage). Often they don't bother to 'fix' that for PC when ported.

When you consider the fact that Rockstar has made it clear they aren't putting this out on a disc, and the PlayStation hard drive can be as little as 1TB, this is definitely news worth discussing. They're asking for one fourth of your entire storage space if you're a PlayStation player.

Yeah but until recently that tracked the decreasing cost of storage, so you might think devs would be prioritizing lower filesizes now

The only game I have installed right now that's over 20GB is Team Fortress 2

okay 👍🏻