I wonder how 2D projects look like

[CocosGames]

In my opinion a 2D empty project is much larger than a 3D one.
I'm not sure, so I want to know about it.

[JohannesDeml]

Hey there!

Hm, well I would say if you have two engines and one only supports 2D and the other one only 3D, then I would agree with you that the 2D engine will likely create smalelr build sizes. But in the case of Unity, the 2D project is just a 3D project with an ortographic camera and without the need of 3D physics.

Here is a comparison between this project's manifest and the manifest of the 2D Built-In Render Pipeline Template from Unity:

As you can see there is not really anything that the 2D project omits by default. The only things I can think off that are not needed are the terrain, terrain physics and Physics packages. But other than that, I don't really see that much else that can be saved. Some shaders might not be needed, but others are needed instead (I guess all in all the 2D shader should be a bit cheaper than Unity's standard Shader).

Why would you expect the 2D build to be smaller? Am I missing something?