Why have game install sizes gotten so large?

Jay85 said:
Whaaaaaat! The crew which is a 20GB file took me a whole 6 hours to download using my iphone as a modem and 3G. Think average download speed was 1.3mb with peaks of upto 2mb
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Not everyone has very good internet. My only options where I live are ADSL2+, which gets 6-7Mb/s at best in our house, or paying ridiculous amounts for BT fibre. (Technically I could get Virgin, but I would rather staple my ears to a horse)

*edit*
To give some perspective, it took me about 4 days of downloading whenever I wasn't sleeping to finally download Bioshock Infinite. Some of that was done at 1/4 speed though because otherwise steam would eat the entire internet and make it completely unusable
 
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They always have. I can remember when you had game files that were 48kb in size.

The tape still took forever and a day to load.

It the law of transfer v. data, downloads expand to fill the available time for its completion, the faster the average data transfer speed and the more sophisticated the hardware the larger the filesize becomes.

The time you actually spend waiting hasn't really changed all that much at all.
 
Reaper 392 said:
there was a story a few months ago of titanfall releasing with 35GB worth of uncompressed audio. The developers explanation was that uncompressed audio is cheaper in CPU performance and therefore reduced the minimum specs a considerable amount. The example they gave is that on a low end two core machine one of the cores would be using the majority of its processing power for audio decompression if compressed audio was used
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I don't understand this.

Why could the files not be compressed for the first download and then permanently uncompressed during the games installation, ready for future play?
 
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