It's a thing I have wondered for a while. My games generally do not contain much content when compared to similarly sized games. For example, my game Jimmy: Dungeon Escape! was only 25 levels long, yet had a filesize of around 80 megabytes (approximately the size of Wolfire's fps "Reciever").
I have thought that it may be the music, but the music source is actually, in total, more space-consuming than the finished product. I have also thought that it may be my excessive use of fastloops, but I do not quite see how that would lead to a huge filesize.
Any thoughts would be helpful, as I am currently revamping my games to be smaller. If youw ould like a sample of source code, just post here and I'll upload it.
If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program.
The rest of them will write Perl programs.
I drop alpha channels as much as possible.. Lower your color mode if you can.
Check your sounds, wav is really large for longer sounds.
Check the Data Elements section, it shows how much space each sound file takes, and it also shows what extensions you used.
Check your data/runtime folder of MMF to see the file size of each extension used, those will be included in the final build.
Make sure you have "Compress Runtime" checked in the Application properties. Although sometimes some anti-virus flag your application as malware when this is used, so make sure you scan it afterwards with an online scanner of some sort.
You can use a sound editor to lower the bit rate, or convert the music files to OGG.
Midi is great but it isn't supported on as many platforms as wav, ogg, and mp3.
Lowering the bit rate or using OGG format is the best choice.