The plague of lardy iPad, iPhone and iPod touch games
In my role as games editor for Tap! magazine, I see and download more iOS games than most people, and so when trends occur, they tend to be very apparent to me. One that’s very much in full flow is the lardy iOS game. In some cases, it’s perhaps excusable for an iOS game to have a very large file-size, if it has a ton of art and other assets, but some recent downloads strike me as utterly crazy. Puzzle Quest 2—essentially a match-three game—weighs in at 576 MB. Worms Crazy Golf HD clocks in at 436 MB—for a side-on artillery game! (By contrast, the similar Super Stickman Golf is an eighth of that size.) And there are many other examples.
The problem is, things get worse on the device, because the app download is only half the story—the buggers then decompress on your device, since app bundles are essentially ZIP files. And then this happens:
- Modern Combat 3: 1.75 GB
- The Oregon Trail for iPad: 1.22 GB
- Puzzle Quest 2: 1.22 GB
- Worms Crazy Golf HD: 995 MB
- Infinity Blade (previously impressively svelte, but no longer): 923 MB
- Street Fighter IV Volt: 876 MB
And then there are countless fairly simple games racking up space into the hundreds of megabytes, often due to poor compression and a lack of interest in efficiency. A good point of comparison are the iOS ZX Spectrum emulators. Elite’s ZX Spectrum collection for iPad is well over 100 MB but the universal Spectaculator is just 19 MB when decompressed. Both apps are essentially the same, enabling you to play ancient Spectrum games on your device. Cracking open the app bundles reveals major differences in approach, though: Elite’s app is packed with hefty PNG files (each up to 2 MB in size—two thirds of the executable file, which is only 2.9 MB), used as full-screen backgrounds for every game’s selection screen. They make the app a little prettier, but also hugely increase its weight. Similar fairly pointless additions affect other iOS games, too, such as Namco’s Galaga collection, which weighs in at 144 MB, in part due to a pointless ‘you’ll only watch this once’ 36 MB movie being included in the app bundle. For good measure, all the jingles are WAV files, so you get 20-second clips of music weighing in at 1.5 MB or so each, rather than relatively tiny MP3s.
Most platforms tend towards bloat as developers learn new tricks and push them in terms of presentation, but iOS has two massive problems in this regard: devices have fixed storage, and updates must be downloaded in full. On the first of those points, if you have an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone, you cannot add extra storage. If your device is fairly full, are you going to delete a ton of games, music and apps to make way for the latest bloated ‘epic’, or are you going to think “sod that” and just download a smaller, sleeker game instead? (This, of course, makes the assumption people actually bother to look at such details; it’s more likely that many download games and only then get annoyed when they realise it wants to grab a fifteenth of their device’s storage, and that there’s no easy way of making room. And I’ll bet only a fraction of iOS device owners who do check app sizes in App Store listings realise apps decompress when on the device—Apple really should be listing expanded app sizes as well as download sizes.) On the second point, once you have a bunch of games, what then when updates appear? It’s all very well downloading a few updates for small apps, but those listed earlier in this article total several GB. If you’re on capped broadband, that’s a huge chunk of your monthly allowance; even if you’re not, you can tie up your bandwidth downloading such colossal games, thereby annoying other people in your household.
I can’t really see things changing. As iOS matures as a gaming platform, a large number of developers are getting sucked in by ‘realism’, ‘gloss’ and ‘3D’. Over time, we’re going to see more—not fewer—games that are in excess of 1 GB to download, and even larger on devices. But sooner or later, people are going to get sick of not being able to load new games, and of massive updates, and they’re just not going to bother. At that point, it’s the devs that care that should win out; and it’s not quite like the old days of squeezing every byte out of a VIC-20—all you’re really having to do is think a bit about your assets and the formats you use, which is a very slight compromise to your vision, in order to improve the practical side of user experience.
“If you’re on capped broadband, that’s a huge chunk of your monthly allowance.”
It gets worse if you have several people sharing a single iTunes account (via Home Sharing). That’s how we do it in my house, so with all five of us it’s 5x the bandwidth to download an update, since Apple offers no way of locally distributing updates from a single point (a la ARD). Ridiculous.
Preach it, Craig. This issue pushed me towards a 64GB iPhone 4S. Unfortunately, just as widening roads usually leads to more traffic, this will probably encourage developers to continue to waste precious space. They’re eating their young by doing this — when someone fills up their phone, I think they’d be less inclined to continue to buy.
Wouldn’t it be nice if developers allowed you to delete full-motion-video clips after you’ve seen them once? As you play the game and progress through it, the install size would gradually decrease, making more space for buying the next big thing!
The other problem I’m finding with this is Time Machine on my Mac. In large part due to the large number of iOS game updates, my Time Machine backups regularly come in at 1GB+ and are running almost half the time, slowing the machine down, even with an SSD…
As a dev who just banged his head on the desk when his game hit the AppStore today at 20.8mb and spent an hour wondering where I can get rid of that .8mb that stops distribution over 3g without hitting performance (the audio is already compressed so much the sound guy is crying into his second lunch) I just want to be able to remotely poke laze developers over the internet with a sharpened stick.
On the flip side, it’s a very nice surprise to find a developer who bucks this trend. I think Shaun Inman (http://www.shauninman.com) should be congratulated for the impossibly-small filesizes of his games:
– The Last Rocket is 1.2MB (64 levels, full soundtrack, graphics, etc)
– Horror Vacui 2 is 1.0MB
Apple probably isn’t complaining, because ever more demanding games could drive users to upgrade on iOS, in the same way they did on the PC.
@Danyal: The problem is that there’s nowhere left for people to go. iOS tops out at 64 GB. If you leave, say, half that for games, you end up with 30ish GB once you take into account system resources. That’s maybe 25 of these massive games—and gamers tend to get through games quite quickly but also don’t want to lost their investment by deleting everything. That all said, I simply don’t think Apple gives two hoots about gaming one way or another—it never has. It’s the devs that should be looking at their 1+ GB apps and thinking “you know, I think we should optimise this a bit”.
This will get even worse with the expected increase in resolution of the next iPad. Even for iPad 1 and 2 apps they will likely contain the increased resolution image and movie files.