Ah, yes. The “let’s bloat our game size to bully other games off your SSD so you’ll be reluctant to ever uninstall it, because reinstalling it would be a big pain, that way you’ll play it indefinitely and give us extra money in micro transactions” strategy.
The idea behind it is that they no longer compress anything because there’s a minor performance benefit. Add in 2k and 4k resolution textures for everything and you’ve got a massive game.
But I also wouldn’t be surprised if they want it to take up so much space that uninstalling and reinstalling it would be too much work, so you just play their game
Not really though. The HW accelerated compression algorithms are quite fast and use dedicated hardware that’s not doing anything if you aren’t using it for that, and it actually increases the effective I/O speeds significantly - this was a huge part of the “road to PS5” presentation by Cerney a few years back.
The problem is that it means optimizing for each target platform. Which is more expensive than not optimizing for any platform. So guess which one Activision does?
Platform specific asset optimisations are completely automated these days.
I would be curious if a large game would push people towards installing or uninstalling more. Personally I keep the 10GB indie titles on my Steam Deck and uninstall anything over 100GB.
Unless you are pirating the game and need to redownload it I wouldn’t give uninstalling it a second thought.