If I said I will let you have a choice of games to buy with a $10 token. One is 5GB and the other one is 100Mb. Which one would you choose?
But then what if I told you the first one has very badly compressed bitmap textures and wav file tunes in it. While the second had clever procedural physics based textures and highly compressed MIDI songs composed by the late Paul McCartney?
Would you still somehow feel cheated that you are not getting enough bytes to the dollar?
Interesting question. I probably would go with the 5GB game because it would indicate more content, especially manually created artsy content. I wouldn’t trust procedural textures yet, and I’m not a Beatles fan. Maybe I’d be swayed a bit if you said like, Hans Zimmer or John Williams or something.
I probably wouldn’t notice until after I’d started the download.
Way to be a good sport with the parameters of the question… 
Size doesn’t really affect my decisions. Some of my favorite games (ie Commander Keen) can easily fit onto a floppy disk.
Cmon, guys, @yoonitee posed the question as if you weren’t going off of reviews, videos, gameplay, etc. Right?.. If not then, sure my answer would’ve been more along the lines of “Advance Wars is my fave game ever” (which is absolutely true), and it’s on a super small cart. I thought this was a blind taste test.
The one that does not require fifty gigabytes of free disk space. Meaning either of those would qualify.
That doesn’t matter.
What matters is gameplay, presentation, and how fun the game is for me.
You can throw all the technologies you can think of, if the product is garbage, cool tech is not gonna save it.
If I have no idea what kind of product that is, I wouldn’t buy either.
The first thing I’d check is reviews, description and screenshots. If those are not available, I wouldn’t buy that unless it is something I saw, played in the past, or if it is part of the series I’m familiar with. I could try it if the store has refund policy in place, though. But in that case decision would’ve been affected by presentation, title, and visible game art.
I was assuming that you would have to spend the $10 token given to you on either game.
If I have to spend a token, I’d need to check the game art or screenshots. File size could affect decision either way. I could assume that developer is probably incompetent and the game is garbage OR I could decide there may be more content. Decision would depend on quality of the available art or screenshots.
The question was “Do you subconsciously value larger file sizes”. My response was no. How is this not answering the question?
Definitely a good point. Which leads me to question if the question in the title of the original post is representative of the contents of that original post… Perhaps they are two completely different questions altogether, in which case, we would again need clarity from the OP.
There are people who dislike large file sizes. Those with limited space or those with laptops or those with mobiles. So this topic is probably gonna hit the top 10 list of pointless topics on the forum for this week.
File sizes end up being a practical decision for most people, not a preferable decision… and usually this is “it’s too big for the storage I have” or “too big a download”. People complaining it’s not big enough obviously aren’t interested in the game at all.
I agree with the pointlessness of the question.
As pointless as it is, I was hoping that the premise of the question was set up to ignore the obvious methods of perception to further explore any sort of validity with content size for value without knowing the quality of that content.
For OP, it’s a pointless question because you may as well ask, if you had to spend $10 on a 5GB virus or a 100MB virus, which one would you buy?
Definitely the smaller one. For visuses, size does have a significant effect on performance.
For games, not so much.
If you wanted a real answer you would probably have to set up some sort of statistical experiment. Release the same identical game with a red and blue version. Pad out one version with a GB of random binary data. Observe the results in the comments and download numbers.
Self reporting is probably not going to be accurate.
Not much to discuss, but I actually think that it IS an interesting question. I personally believe there is some level of seeing larger file sizes as being more content-rich and more complete. I do it myself sometimes - when I buy a game on Steam and then go to download it, if the size is really small there’s at least a LITTLE disappointment that goes through my mind, thinking that on some level I’m not getting much “STUFF”. It’s totally stupid, but it’s real. I definitely prefer my builds to be bigger rather than smaller.
I am sure I have seen people bitch on steam about a game being too small in filesize for the asking price. But then again, I’ve seen people bitch about almost everything on steam. Imho this is a very bad question to ask about on a gamedev forum, because having a strong understanding of technical things is something that almost everyone here will have. “Out there” are people who believe their computer will run faster if they have more free space on their hard drive and people who think there is no way a 100mb game is worth 10$ when they get about 50000 mb for 50$ when they buy a COD game.
I really should have said “unknown piece of software” rather than virus, but I’ve been aimlessly wandering around a Michael’s “against my will” for the past hour and wanted to contribute to the forums in whatever capacity.
I think that game size pretty much only indicates how much developer cared about making the game small.
You know, in some cases it used to be true. In the past one of the linux ntfs support modules used to have an amusing glitch - having less space on ntfs volume progressivley made writing into volume slover.
Speaking of sizes, dwarf fortress is 34 megabytes archived.
In case of (utility) software smaller is better. I vagually remember when Adobe Acrobat Reader suddenly started getting bloated and reached ridiculous sizes - hundreds of megabytes. Which is why people started ditching it. No point in installing hunrdreds of megabytes of junk when 10 megabyte program can do the same job.
Interestingly enough though an SSD’s performance will degrade the closer it comes to being completely full.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2110095/the-ultimate-guide-to-proper-ssd-management.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op