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.
Yeah, it’s not a conspiracy to make people play the game, it’s that efficient code costs more, and the bloat doesn’t effect their sales enough to pay coders to make it efficient
you can’t write 200 GB of code unless you’re GPT. Those files are all needlessly high quality models and textures, environments, etc.
Are they just leaving their textures uncompressed for the performance advantage that would offer? It’s pretty much common practice now to just compress them and have the game engine decompress them on the fly, but that does have a significant performance cost.
I could see it making a difference if they are going for “twitch” shooter. But I don’t know enough about shooters to know if that is the gameplay style cod is going for, or if that is even a term for shooters people use anymore.
They are probably using DirectStorage to increase game performance, that means that the only compression available to them is GDEFLATE. And that’s not the most efficient algorithm for photo like images as used in textures.