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.