hallo everybody, I developed a casual game ( I don't know if the forum etiquette allows self promotion here, so I'll let the curious search by themselves on the proper forum ) that turned out to be quite small in size compared to games with similar content, and I was wondering, do people usually care about such size optimizations ? or worse, is it considered a sign of poor content ?
My assumption is that most players won't care to look at how big the game is... There are some users that have limited space on their phones, so it will make a difference if the game is bloated... Also there's the 100mb download limit over the network.
A very large file size makes me think twice as it'll mean I have to delete stuff, large file sizes, unless it's something I really love, are the first to go once I get bored and need the space. Small file sizes I'll dload anyway, because if it takes a little space and I enjoy it I keep it longer. Most of my ipad is full of smaller sized games I don't look at small sizes and think they must be rubbish. I judge games on playing them, not the file size.
I'd say try to keep your game under 100MB and you should be fine. In the app world at least, smaller [size] is better and can't hurt!
thank you all as a user, that's what I do too; moreover, I find excessive downloading time annoying and a showstopper sometime, mobile or even home connections are not that good everywhere; that said, probably users with faster connections spends more $ than others, so, all in all, RareSloth's assumption could be reasonable in practice. So, do you think it's worth to optimize on size ( things like assets specific compression / runtime generation strategies ) for apps <~ 50Mb ? or size becomes an issue for you only when the ~50/100Mb point is reached ?
Not a dev, just a player here I couldn't care less about download times. My Air doesn't have a mobile connection, so I am always on my home network (glassfibre, 50Mbit/s) . If the download takes 15 minutes or more, I have no problem waiting for that. If you are on a slow connection (like folks in rural areas, for example) you are screwed anyways; and every bit is one too many. That's two different things: 1) Optimise filesize? Please, yes. Even with enough storage space on my device I appreciate that. It does make a difference, if it's 1GB or 2GB. However, with the device-targeted app-splitting in iOS9, the situation should improve. 2) Size itself an issue: if you aim for the mobile/"casual" target group, staying under the 100MB download limit over mobile connection definitely is a good idea. Once you are past that limit, I'd think it no longer matters.
I was speaking more from a dev pov ( any kind of optimization is a dev cost and usually requires to design proactively for it ) but user pov is always valuable, thanks well, if anything less than fiber glass is "rural", then my country is 90% rural area I think
I know that optimisation is dev cost (I work in a software development company), and that this usually means lots of hard work noone thanks you for . Which is why I appreciate it all the more. Ah, should have elaborated on that a bit more. I live in the Netherlands now, and over the last few years we had a huge push (encouraged by the government, I guess) to get glassfibre (FTTH "fibre to the home", specifically) laid down wherever possible. According to Akamai, the Netherlands are #6 worldwide in average connection speed. Here's a good map of average speed per country in Europe: http://jakubmarian.com/average-internet-connection-speed-by-country-in-europe/ Now, averages never tell the whole story, naturally. And this is where we get back to the "rural areas": I'm originally from Germany. DSL via copper cable is still the predominant technology there (different issue, not going into that now), followed by TV cable. But you still have a lot of less populated and/or further out areas, where the lines are too long to make DSL feasible without significant extra investments. Those poor folks frequently are still stuck with ISDN and/or Satellite uplink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Germany has some info, if you are curious. That was what I had in mind when I mentioned "rural areas". Didn't realise how much assumed knowledge is in that short statement. Sorry for that.
I would assume that the only major factor is the 100MB download limit while you're not on WiFi, as a lot of the bored or commuting App Store browsers are likely not on WiFi. Of course, if you go over 300MB or so, people with 8, 16 or even 32 gig phones may start to think if it's worth it, since they might need to delete their precious 1 gig holiday videos before downloading your game. The only factor that'll likely affect the downloads is, I'd say, that line between 99.9 and 100.1 MB. Also: not sure what the limit is on Google Play, Amazon etc.
From my experience, we saw a 70% drop off when we accidentally went over the over the air limit on an update. I'm sure that respecting this threshold is a must for casual games.
I don't care the size of a game because resource data may be downloaded after installation. Rather, I usually guess the content/quality from screenshots and videos.
