Post by Eldwood in There should be a form of quality control for games

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If we’re going to remove games based on size, I’d rather see games over 100MB removed. Big games are often a sign of one or more of the following:

The developer is a newbie who doesn’t know how to optimize file size.
The developer doesn’t care enough about the user to optimize file size.
The developer is trying to dazzle with high quality assets instead of focusing on the core of the game.
The developer is filling their game with low-quality-but-high-file-size slop.
Instead of making a fun 5 minute game, the developer is creating a 40 hour game that’s only fun for 5 minutes.

None of which bode well for the quality of the game. There are good 100MB+ games on itch, but they are the minority.

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Hugues Ross24 days ago

Well, I think it’s pretty unlikely that itch would do any kind of removal based on size in the first place (though it’s still good to push against the notion that small means bad, it doesn’t in the slightest). Bear in mind that itch has a soft upper limit on uploads, since you have to ask permission to publish a game that’s over 1GB in size…

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Eldwood24 days ago(+2)

Oh yeah, I’m not in favor of removing any games based on size. Or even quality. It’s a good thing that makers of low quality games have a place to host their games, and itch.io is that place. I’m just saying, let’s not throw out the good games and keep the bad ones.

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A Fals Fiction24 days ago (1 edit)

Yeah, that soft upper limit is generous. I feel it would be better as a hard line for game uploads.

There was a visual novel on the front page recently that looked appealing until I saw its download was in GB. Gigabytes. And more than one. Here on Itch.io.

Why us that big? Who’s it for? Why was that approved? Who knows.

The graphics and visuals didn’t look significantly better than similar games that are a tenth the size (admittedly with lower-cost hardware like many indie developers have). I’m guessing the behemoth has large voice files but also invisible colors that weren’t compressed out.

I went to check the sizes of other large games with similar designs and themes. Those were large at 250 MB to 600 MB, far over 100 MB for 2D images (not counting simple animations), but each is several times smaller than that one exception to the upload limit.

In contrast, each country of our world could be represented by a game that’s under 10 MB and take up the same amount as space as that one game. I like how Itch.io could host a challenge like that.

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