I managed to compress warband (native only) to just over 200mb. The game is originally about 2gb, the latest version 1.173.

And it was only 200mb because I didn't want to be more aggressive with the compression, I wanted to keep the quality minimally pleasant

There were one or two textures with alpha that I converted to DXT2 (binary alpha). Also: UI textures I reduced in size by 2x, other textures I reduced by 4x. Audio by default is vorbis 256kb, I reduced it to 32kb. I also had to remove support for Chinese, Japanese, etc.

While I was doing this, I remembered that 20 years ago, back in the days of slow internet and windows xp, I used to download rip versions of games, which used bat to decompress the texture and audio files to a format that the game supported. If I did that, I might be able to reduce the size of the game even more and even increase the quality, because I think something like opus could have the same quality with half the bitrate of a vorbis?

This kind of thing doesn't seem to exist anymore, now what we see in things like fitgirl is simply using extremely inefficient compressors, like paq8, which takes almost a day to decompress 30gb.

Well, I actually created this thread to share this experience: RIP games. Fitgirl uses compression without loss of quality. Why aren't there more rip games, games that are truly compressed with no loss of quality?

Current games already have a lot of support for modern formats, eliminating the need to “extract to the correct format”, as I did with Warband. Why aren't people interested in this? It would be very interesting to see bg3 in 10gb, without the need to install it, just extract it.