[The original post with its original format can be found here]
Players want to play, they don't want to wait. Help them buying your game: reduce your game's download size with Unity Addressables Hosting. And a year later? Offer them a DLC based on, guess what? Addressables.
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Picture your potential player on a Friday afternoon.
Your player has just left behind a hard week with long working hours. Their wife or husband is gone to their family's country house for the weekend along with the kids. The perfect time to go home, order pizza and browse through Steam with the wallet at hand.
With or without kids, with or without partner, we all had these awesome weekends.
Just videogames, please.
Pizza-Laptop
So your player comes across your newly released game in the Steam shop. They see all the effort you put into creating polished content.
No need for convincing, they hand in their credit card details and buy two copies of your game. One for theirself, another for their friend / brother / sister.
You get your 19.95 bucks, twice. Both users happily start installing the game.
But wait...
A wild Steam installation pop-up appears.
Steam-Long-Remaining-Time
The remaining installation time suddenly exploded to 12 hours
What, 12 hours for over 30GB? What the fuck is in this game?
I'm not wasting my weekend on this shit, I'm out!
What happens afterward is not uncommon.
Your ex-player requests a full refund and purchase instead the next game in their wish-list.
One of the pain points for players is the waiting time wasted on downloading all the bytes of the whole game and start playing. People do not have that much time. Nothing will burn a hole in your wallet faster than an angry player.
Do you need to include in your installation package all these assets that are spawned in the level 5 of your game? Chances are, you don't.
Players will need a couple of hours to play through the initial content of your game. Use that to your advantage
The idea is simple.
Provide the minimum content possible in your game installation package and download the rest while playing the initial levels of your game.
Can you picture your player ready to play in a mere minute after purchasing your game? How different would the reviews be compared to the ones commonly found with huge games?
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Bad-Review-Space-1
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Ideally, your game's download size should be below 100MB.
But how?
This is what you will get by the time you're done implementing the information of this article:
Ridiculously tiny installation sizes
A new Amazon S3 bucket to host your content online
Upload Unity Addressable Assets to S3 through the Unity Editor
Download the Unity Addressable Assets from the S3 bucket in your player builds
A high-five from your happy players
Ralph-Simpsons
Fox / Via mashable.com
Level 1 Developer: "Storage is cheap, anyway"
We started developing our game a few months ago and we have big plans for it.
You and I worked endless hours into creating highly polished content.
Not only that, we saw some great offers in the Unity Asset Store, so we bought several asset packs at heavily discounted prices.
Now our game is full of content our players will love to play through. Those Sci-Fi modular parts, the exploding particle systems, the punchy soundtrack.
It's all gorgeous.
And heavy.
And slow to download.
Now your Android APK is well over 2GB, so you need to start messing with expansion files, which adds another good week to your efforts. But it's fine, we all have time here.
Or maybe you're publishing on Steam, so you can be at 30 GB, no problem. You just need a few hours for uploading it. And players? It's ok, people have a fast connection nowadays.
So we released our game. Some players reported some bugs, so we make a 5-minute fix and we go through all the long process again. Build, wait for hours, upload to stores, wait for hours.
And our players? They just re-download the whole thing again. Wait for hours, then start playing.
It's not a big deal.
Only that you are not recovering all the time you wasted on this previously. And a great deal of your players will stop downloading your game once they see how many hours they have to wait. That only gets worse with each update. Did I mention refunds?
We can do better than this, now that we have the tools.
Let's upgrade our skills to Level-2.
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Level 2 Developer: Unity Addressables Hosting
Welcome to Unity Addressables.
This package will allow you to efficiently manage your game assets. That, my friend, includes online distribution. For an introduction on this topic, visit my previous article on Unity Addressables Benefits for your game.
These are the steps you and I will be following in the article:
Set up an Amazon S3 Bucket for online distribution
Mark our content as Unity Addressable Assets for online distribution
Upload our content to the cloud
Profit from tiny installation sizes (and others)
Like granny said, a 2D sprite is worth a thousand times:
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Unity Addressables Hosting with Amazon S3 - Steps
Let's start with...
1. Setting Up a Free Amazon S3 Bucket
It's our lucky day. Amazon offers a free tier for their S3 service.
That means, we're going to host our content for free. The limitations for their free tier is mostly storage space and the number data transfers. At the moment of writing this, you can store for free up 5GB and perform 20,000 GET and 2,000 PUT requests, but do double check it in the official site of AWS Free Tiers</
