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Data Storage IT Technology

Smartphone Storage Space Is the New Turf War for Game Makers (bloomberg.com) 51

Posted by msmash from the storage-wars dept.
From Tokyo to San Francisco, mobile game studios have sparred for years to captivate a fickle audience, fostering an overlooked problem -- the average title has become so huge that players can no longer fit more than a few on their phones. From a report: Japanese games publisher Gree expects an impending reckoning over escalating costs and ballooning file sizes, as developers pack their games with increasingly intricate graphics, voice acting and larger storylines, all to get players spending. That's creating a winner-takes-all situation that could winnow out smaller studios in coming years, Gree Senior Vice President Yuta Maeda said in an interview. The situation will only get worse as console veteran Sony -- no stranger to space-hogging hits -- prepares to invade the mobile arena. "Production of mobile games can't avoid becoming more complex, time-consuming and larger-scale, which will inevitably result in bigger app sizes," Maeda said. "Companies that survive in the market will only be the ones that can keep up with that trend."

The spending poured into today's A-list mobile titles -- MiHoYo's Genshin Impact, for instance, started with a $100 million budget -- rivals Hollywood blockbusters and is yielding better production values than ever, but also an outsized footprint. That game can occupy upwards of 20 gigabytes of storage, which is a huge chunk of what most people have available on their phones. With memory upgrades not keeping pace, the result is fewer games can vie for attention. Sony, one of the giants of console gaming, has laid out plans to bring its high-profile PlayStation franchises to mobile platforms. Rival Microsoft is also building an Xbox mobile gaming store. All of that piles pressure on the entrenched free-to-play business model followed by Gree and others. These publishers rely on monetizing in-game items and upgrades, regularly adding more content players can buy and play with. The most common workaround from game studios is to put only a basic installer in app stores, which then downloads further game assets once the player starts. Gree uses it with Heaven Burns Red, which is an initial 1GB and grows beyond 10GB for players who want the full experience.
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Smartphone Storage Space Is the New Turf War for Game Makers More

Smartphone Storage Space Is the New Turf War for Game Makers

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  • will apple comedown with an MAX size per app? (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday October 27, 2022 @04:14PM (#63003777)

    will apple comedown with an MAX size per app?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • My not top of the line ,250$, has a 512GB microSD card, how much is needed now???

    • has a 512GB microSD card, how much is needed now

      Remember that the users of a certain fruity brand of shiny widgets don't have the luxury of an SD card slot(*).

      For us people running Android or GNU/Linux: yes, that's the most straight forward answer. Just throw some uSDXC into the slot to expand the damn storage and be done.

      (*) they still have the option to fork off another 1 or 2 grands for a new phone with marginally improved specs, but still otherwise crappy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Scoth ( 879800 )

        Annoyingly a log of flagship Android phones don't have sd card slots anymore either. It mainly seems to be a hallmark of low and middle end phones as a way to make up for their low built-in storage. I'd love to see them make a comeback.

        • Annoyingly a log of flagship Android phones don't have sd card slots anymore either.

          Even more infuriating, the presence of an SD slot is of limited utility in this context, because Android can't figure out what to do with one. I've got a OnePlus Nord N200, and it'll use the SD card for photo and video storage, but OxygenOS 12 doesn't allow apps to be installed to the SD card. I have a OnePlus 8T that's running LineageOS, and I install apps to SD using a Magisk module. My old Nokia 7.2 running Android 11 allowed SD cards to be used as extensions to native storage, as long as it passed a thr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msk ( 6205 )

        Starting with the Google Pixel 6, released a year ago, Pixel phones no longer have microSD slots or analog audio jacks.

        The budget-friendly "a" release models (5a, 6a) tend to have 128 GB of internal storage.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Amnenth ( 698898 )

        I won't deny that a SD card slot is a perk that's missing on the Apple side (and now from some Android flagships, too? Damn.) but for basic users it can complicate things further.

        Capacity is easy to understand, but then you also need to factor in the read and write speeds of the card's memory controller and overall write durability of the card. I figure most readers here can deal with that just fine, but Average User J. Smith is most likely going to focus on capacity and cost, and end up with a card that lo

        • but then you also need to factor in the read and write speeds of the card's memory controller and overall write durability of the card.

          Oh yes, the whole thing seems an exercice in trying to throw as much confusion as possible (A2 V90 U3 Class10 rating!) while using as weird product range names as possible (the one you want is the "Extreme Pro Max plus ").

          but Average User J. Smith is most likely going to focus on capacity and cost, and end up with a card that looks spacious, but is physically painful to use because it takes forever to transfer data *to* the card - and then has garbage read times compared to the phone's onboard storage anyways.

          On the other hand, Average User J Smith will probably only install 1 single AAA game on their phone because they heard it touted by some TikGramTuber or whatever, see the shiny graphical effect on the intro/tutorial mission, get frustrated as intended by the next mission, blow some money o

      • MicroSD is also extremely slow compared to the internal storage, so, not great for big games.

        I think to some degree they intentionally put small amounts of storage into phones, and charge extortionate amounts of money for more, to herd people onto cloud storage and streaming.

        • MicroSD is also extremely slow compared to the internal storage, so, not great for big games.

          Yes, try to say that to the Steamdeck users who put 2TB class A2 card [wikipedia.org] in theirs~
          The combination of a decent file system and good performance card make a ton of difference.

          The problem doesn't stem as much from some inherent problems of the SD format (nothing inherently wrong) as the difficulty to navitage all the variations in rating (A2 vs A1 vs no a, U3 vs U1, V90/60/30/etc., Class 10) and trying to find the corresponding product range at your favourite manufacturer ("Extreme Pro Plus" or something ?!?).
          An

          • This is anecdotal but I moved the very same MicroSD from my previous phone (Galaxy S8 Active) to my new phone (A53) and it in the new phone it is much, much slower. I can't explain it.

            • You mean SD slower than the main storage of the phone, or slower than when in the old phone?

              vs. main storage:

              A quickly googling reveals the internal storage of the A53 is UFS type 2 [wikipedia.org]. It's SATA-like and thus going to be always faster than any eMMC external storage. (Though with proper rating the external SD is going to be good enough).

              vs. when in older phone:

              it probably boils to the alphabet soup of ratings on your card and whatever the phone supports. The phone is probably looking for something (e.g.: the h

    • Wonder what the transfer rate looks like? And if it'd be noticeable in game.

  • At some point, the console wars were waged over hardware that is pitiful in comparison. How much time and money did people pour into games for the SNES/Gameboy/Gamegear/Genesis/etc? And yet the games (the ones that are remembered, anyway), consumed very little space and had high replayability. How many A-list titles now have 15GB+ of texture packs and still manage to suck? The storage space isn't the problem here....
    • The first time I ran an console emulator, and realised that ROMs were actually tiny, I was dumbfounded. Super mario world fitting in a floppy disk. And, as you say, these days, tens of gigabytes for uninspired forgettable trash

    • Games have entered a problematic age.

      Back in the days of the Atari 2600, creating a game was a matter of a couple weeks. No, really. A programmer could finish a game within 2-3 months. And yes, I said a programmer. Singular. There wasn't that much graphics to deal with, two lines and a dot was the character, three more lines and a couple dots was the rest. No need to get an "artist" involved. The logic had to be pretty primitive, too, because, well, there was neither a lot of space nor a lot of processing p

  • Bring back the storage expansion slot (micro SD). If you can just pop in 1TB when needed and if not you can always just swap cards for different games. That said some of the larger PC games I'm aware of don't quite hit 1/3 TB so it'll take phones some time to fill those cards.
  • Long ago, computer storage and memory were expensive and companies programmed games to be lean and pull the most amount of processing it could. But as those increased programmers stopped being efficient as the constraint disappeared. For years there were complaints about how programmers were making their code bloated and the art of programming efficiently had disappeared. Now because the new place to code is on phones and the storage isn't increasing as quickly as PCs the art of tight coding seems to be los

    • It's not the code that's taking up 20GB space. It's the textures, models, animations, sound effects / voices, effect, etc. And there's no magical way to create a game with modern, high-def graphics and sounds without a pretty hefty storage budget.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Yes, well familiar with the demoscene. A former colleague actually wrote a few of them himself. While it's very cool stuff they do, they have the advantage of being able to generate pretty much anything cool looking without any real constraint or consistent art direction, and are often very abstract in nature. For most commercial products, you just can't generate everything (or honestly, very much) procedurally.

          Procedural generation is certainly used in the development process, but real-time use tends to

  • This isn't on the devs. Well partly for making another bloated mess of a game.
    But if Google (I know Android has the microSD option.for now) and Apple would bring back the microSD card slot back, add some proper file management, and everything will be solved.

  • Can the EU or Brazil get Apple to include a slot for a MicroSD card too? Is there an inherent speed difference though? Between onboard NAND and a card. I know some cards are much faster/slower than others, but if you do your homework and buy a good one...

    Also, how high of resolution do they need for a phone? A wirelessly networked device that could just download from a server regularly to swap in/out stuff too.

    I can't say I'm the target market though. Only mobile games I got into were GPS based ones (I

    • The best microSD cards top out at 100 to 150MB per sec read, since it can't do the fancy striping bigger NAND devices can do. Which leads to the internal NAND being NVME these days, so it can read/write 2000MB/s and above. This results in a *massive* performance gap between internal and external storage.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • External NVME doesn't exist at that size. The smallest you can possibly get something like that is the M.2 2230 format. Anything smaller doesn't have the space for all the NAND chips and the hot controller required for striping to reach such speeds.
  • No problem, just upgrade your phone as everyone does. it's as simple as that, you just pick up your new smartphone [digitaltrends.com] and all is well. After all, it "has 18GB RAM and 1TB storage"; that should last for a few games. (Y'know, I've got two good laptops that don't even meet those specs. My (old) main box doesn't, either.)

    It's covered in ... "Himalaya Alligator leather". Hmmm, I didn't know the Himalaya mountains HAD alligators; you learn something new every day.

    The price? Well, like all good things, if yo
  • If handset manufacturers would just add back the Micro SD slots, this wouldn't be a problem. I blame Google and Apple for this, and their instance on having us use their damn online storage.

  • "MiHoYo's Genshin Impact, for instance, started with a $100 million budget ... That game can occupy upwards of 20 gigabytes of storage"

    Ah yes, Call of the Waifu.

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