because why should EVERY pl.ayer have to waste that bandwidth, and waste that hard drive space, for no benefit? the download is currently over 2 gigs when it should be 300 megs. This means to play the game you need 4 gigs of space (the zip, plus the unzipped copy) when a player SHOULD only need 600megs to get it to a playabl.e state. once the bloated files reach 10 gigs later on you'll need 20 gigs of hd space when should have needed less than 3. its artificially tieing up players resources.
that aside bandwidth is an issue. for some people (like me) that only costs time. for others their internet connections are metered. they have a limited amount of data transfer per month. so when a game is artificially bloated to use ten times more data than it needs to, that means the player can download only a tenth as many games without it costing money.
> the renders are already webp
this doesnt help when the dev explicitly chose not to use the correct setting. i already shared an example where their PNGs were the wrong settings and the compressed version at top of page 3 uses correct settings. here below is one of the devs webp files. it is 2mb. the webp/85 version is 150kb, the avif/85 version is 222kb (which is higher quality than webp even if same qual number, thus size increase). using either correct export setting is effectively 1/10th of the file size of the incorrect settings