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Why not ship the audio compressed and decompress it once when the game gets installed?

That wouldn’t help people whose issue with large game size is the amount of space used on their disk, but it would help people whose issue is the long download times.

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For all we know it actually worked that way. Steam definitely decompresses game assets at install time. The people complaining about game sizes aren't looking at the depot files you download when installing the game, they're looking at their HDD (which is fair!)

My guess is Valve doesn't offer a 'decompress your ogg files to wav at install time' feature though.

Titanfall did work this way on the EA launcher. There was a tool that it'd run on first launch to decompress the compressed audio files.

But why.

Even when you do want lossless assets, as long as you compress in reasonable chunks there is no downside.

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