Diablo 4 has become too big of a game for what it offers and this is no doubt due to file bloatage, blizzard is notoriously known for its titles flexing horrible file size due to lack of file compression.
I can count 7 people i know personally that have given up overwatch due to extreme filesize and 4 about to be 5 giving up diablo 4.
These games are great but not at the cost of filesize, sooner or later your forcing every player to make a choice delete games they love for your bloatage or give up on it, this inevitable ends in everyone deleting diablo/overwatch sooner or later, thats just the math.
Unused assets such as bloated debug files, duplicate textures, uncompressed localization audio, dumping uncompressed files or failure to use platform native device compression tools should not be the standard for a game this old, it shouldn’t be the standard ever.
devs should not need to be told to comb through and fix these things especially when your game is pushing towards 1/5 of a TB, this is gross and frankly there’s way too many reasons for why this cant be justified.
You want to have a conversation about game longevity and retainment of users longterm I can only imagine the amount of players who have Uninstalled diablo 4/overwatch not because these are bad games but because they cannot and will not tolerate it being the size it is, for a physical example how diablo 4 is the size of warframe, rainbow six siege and elden ring nightreign combined, with spare gbs left over this is disgusting.
There is no justifiable reason for bloatage like this beyond laziness and financial greed, which is ironic because your most certainly losing money by eliminating a massive chunk of your playerbase trying to save money.
you have a massive playerbase who is waiting to comeback to diablo 4 but wont when its the biggest game on their playable device.
fix the bloatage compress the files and save all of us a guaranteed headache, I mean your even using isometric camera angles which take massive performance reductions so you dont even get the regular excuses/reasons for a huge chunk of system bloatage.
I was hoping I would never have to make this post given many game devs have taken and started compressing their files and debloating their games because they understand this but I guess blizzard never got the message.
Sincerely a concerned fan saying the obvious in a time where commonsense is not obvious.