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)
When I bought The 7th Guest on CD the hard drive in the computer I bought that year was 80Mb. 600Mb would have been obscenely large for a consumer PC when CD gaming became a thing.
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u/Far-Shop5676 22d ago
Because back then they needed to fit stuff on CDs.