“Who cares about shaving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD?”
Games now ship at 150GB and up, and the industry’s answer is lossless codecs tuned to load faster off an SSD. Geldreich built crunch and worked at Valve and Ensemble Studios. His fix is to compress the texture signal with real image codecs and build GPU formats on the player’s machine. Studios optimize the seconds they measure and ignore the days their customers spend downloading.