What file size would be considered acceptable?

Hey guys, quick question here.

Just in the process of beginning my mapping for my project and I will be parallax mapping my entire project. The individual screens/maps themselves wont be overly big, but there will be a lot of them. Combined with everything else that goes along with a game like this, I imagine I will end up with a very beefy project file and .exe

What size would you personally be happy with downloading and playing? (on PC/Mac only, not Mobile devices)

I know default parallax size is 800x800 just to let you know.

Generally speaking, I don't like an RM game that has more than 200mb. Around 100mb is acceptable/okay-ish.

Specifically speaking, that depends on how you present your game in your page. You advertised your game in RTP, all default, even parallax uses default RTP, 300~400mb, I won't give a second glance. That somehow reflect you don't even bother to try to reduce your game size by removing unused assets, compressing the game data to smaller size like using tinypng or lower bit rate for audio. Assuming that, I also doubt if I'm gonna enjoy your game even longer than watching an episode of anime (24 minutes) with same size.

You put an effort to your game, custom draw character, some action sequence, or just new animations if you're using front view. Or anything that it is not another RTP based game, 200mb, I find it okay. You have optimized your game and that a sign you might care about your (potential) players. If you managed to even smaller than 200mb, that's even better.

So in short, if a game has bigger size, I also demand more enjoyment that is not only from its graphics or music. I will be much more forgiving if the game has smaller size then turned out to be not my taste of game.

Depends on which of the engine versions its built on to an extent. I just made a small MV game that only has 2 audio tracks, no battle artwork and one sprite sheet for characters and its still 80mb after getting rid of the unused assets. In all honest most game downloads are 20GB+ these days so I really don't care how big a game is, I only care if its big due to not being optimised.

Is it already compressed? Or compressed image doesn't work well in MV?

My Driftwood 5 minute game jam entry was 95mb or so after stripping away all unused graphics. It has 2 Sideview battlers, on battle back, 2 or 3 audio tracks, a few SE, 1 blank map with 1 parallax, 3 character busts, it does have a fair number of animations but still. A few entries were about 600mb from not excluding unused files and made of all RTP. Just be upfront about your games size and why it's so large and most won't mind.

Theres less than 10 images in the whole game for a combined filesize outside of the export of 75kb. :/

My game for the One Map Challenge has 33 MB but there's no music, just two or three sounds, no animations, battlers (no battle in the game), and just a few charsets and tilesets, so I guess it has an okay size.

Personally the smaller the file, the better for me, although I personally wouldnt download anything that it doesnt fit a CD (700MB)

I mean would depend on the game length really but I'm easily okay with downloading something hundreds of mb for a rpg maker project if it was a longer one and I was interested in it. That being said I think one should strive to make the file as reasonably small for what the project is.

Unless the game is reaching 750mb or more, I generally don't care either way. If I do see a larger download size, i do become a bit curious and suspicious as to why it's so huge

To discredit or pass up on a game due to file size just seems silly to me, RTP or not.

I have just checked my last game - made with Ace, so lighter than MV, but I think the numbers are interesting anyway. These numbers are similar to all my other games.

I have 62 music tracks and a lot of extra SEs and BGSs. All battlers are SV animated, so that's 6 actors (one has 2 battler sprite sheets as she can 'transform') and 105 unique enemies. I have a huge number of additional animation sheets, 251 maps, a lot of character art, and a lot of custom tilesets. The game lasts for 12 hours for me, probably at least 15 for players. It comes in at 168 Mb. I get it that low by putting everything possible through tinypng, ogg music files and being ruthless about discarding anything not needed. There is no need to have a massive file size if you're prepared to take the time and trouble to reduce it.

I make a point of trying to keep it as low as possible because I am aware that not all players have access to high speed downloads; others are limited by the amount of data they can download under their IP contracts. I don't want anyone excluded because of things like that.

Oh wow, I just tried out TinyPNG and that makes a substantial difference. Could cut out roughly 60% of unnecessary data just from the images themselves.
Other than that, I make a habit of removing clutter and files that I don't need, but it's great to hear what you guys think. Thanks guys :D

This is basically how I feel. Everyone is used to gigantic filesizes for games now, so a chunky indie RPG that takes up 3 gigs shouldn't make many people flinch.

@Kes : Any chance you could share how you got your file size down so much? My music files are .ogg and are shorter than yours in length but I'm averaging 3.5 MB per music file or so still. As it is, the best I can do is get my game down to 381 MB and that is with all the needed RTP files included manually.

Probably lowering the bit rate to 128kbps or even lower.

@bgillisp This is the site I use to convert files to ogg. Even files which are already ogg will come back smaller.
At that sort of file size, I'm wondering if you remembered to put all the animation sheets (i.e. the ones used to make skill animations in the editor) through tinypng (my preferred) or similar? You will save over 50 Mb just on that folder alone.

@ForestLogic Actually, it isn't the case that "everyone is used to gigantic file sizes" so let's not bother. I have players from around the world, many of whom are excluded from sections of the market precisely by those gigantic file sizes. You should not extrapolate from one section/country to a universal statement. There are also people on this very site who complain about the big file sizes due to how much HD space they take up. Not everyone has a high end setup, and as someone who produces commercial games, I see no logic in reducing my potential sales when I can do something about it.

@Kes : The animation folder is 61.4 MB. So you are saying it can go all the way down to 10 MB? That seems impossible to me, though I'll still give that site a try. As it is, the big problem is the BGM folder, which is 160 MB by itself. And yes, I use all those files in the game.

Edit: I did find 3 files in not ogg format which might save a little, but I'm still probably looking at 150 MB or so.

@bgillisp You'd be amazed at the difference it can make. Take Heal 4, for instance. I've just put that through tinyping for the purposes of this reply. It went from 1.5 Mb down to 239 kb. Thinking back, that 50Mb probably included a few (5 or 6 maybe?) non-default animation sheets as well, but you can see from Heal4 the order of magnitude in size reduction.

I don't want to derail this thread, so if you want to discuss that music folder any further, perhaps a pm? Mine was 65.3Mb

It dropped a little when I converted the mp3 files I still had to ogg. But it's still 145 MB. There's 72 files, I just counted, so to get it that low I'd have to go below 1 MB a file, which as some of them are 3 minutes long might be impossible (the site you posted did 2.5 MB for a 3 minute file when I just checked it).

Will try the other idea too, but I still think its going to be 200 - 300 MB in the end no matter what. I may PM for more on this when I have more time to sit down with it, but that might be a week or so as this week RL is keeping me pretty busy.

It had been warned to be derailed, but I still want to do it so pardon me in advance.
Will this pic do the justice?