

A big part of games taking up more and more space is due to higher resolution assets. Creating installers only installing needed assets would drastically reduce the size for anyone not playing on extreme or whatever they call the maximum resolution.
But games do still tend to be among the archetypes of software, which hits bottlenecks that needs performance optimisations. You only have whatever hardware your end user has, you can’t just buy a bigger server… well Google Stadia tried

and how many images are above 16k x 16k pixels?
If you have an optimisation for 99% of all online images, then that’s dope - You can use more niche or older compressions for your very high pixel files