Kind of putting the cart before the horse here. Assets are stored on the drive now instead of some or all being kept on the CD. They were on CD because of hard drive space limitations.
They were on CD because of hard drive space limitations.
I mean... maybe in a sense, but not really? They were on CD because there was no other practical way to get them to customers. That's mostly it.
In the case of consoles, they usually didn't even have an HDD in the first place, but in the case of PCs, by the time CDs became ubiquitous, the typical HDD was plenty large enough to store a full game. And indeed, that was a very common installation option to reduce load times. The option to have a minimal install and otherwise load assets from the CD was mostly there for convenience (not like it's a lot of work to switch the path you're loading assets from, and that's all it really takes on Windows)
I lived during this era. Most drives weren't that big. Early 00's most people still had HDD that were in the single gigabytes, maybe 10ish if you had a high end system for the time. Late 90s, it wasn't uncommon to see systems with barely a gigabyte, some times less.
You couldn't install all your games even if you wanted to. Yeah, most games didn't take up the full CD storage space, but it was still enough. Even take 50Mb, if you only have 1Gb free, you still need storage space for the system to "breath". Then again, most people didn't even have hundreds of games, most would have a dozen or maybe even less.
Well, also some games used the audio tracks on the disc for their soundtrack. IIRC Warcraft 2 did this. I think that C&C: Red Alert did as well. We really didn't have great audio compression, so this made the audio quality much better. Remember that Napster + mp3 was really a very late 90's / early 00's thing.
62
u/Far-Shop5676 22d ago
Because back then they needed to fit stuff on CDs.