It happened once to me that I was doing an app with a lot of pictures. Depending which one the player selected I was Instantiating one of the prefabs from my long list. To my surprise, that list of references was causing ALL the prefabs to load into memory, and therefore all the images. Moral of the story? Profiling never lies - See more at: http://unitydojo.blogspot.com/2015/05/121-tips-to-optimize-your-unity-2d.html#sthash.zZ8dzPYa.dpuf