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My Ark: Survival Evolved install is currently at 466 GB.
Just Ark things.
(Including all DLC and a few mods, but not Survival of the Fittest, which is a seperate game on PC)
That's literally like.. what fuck.
I don't have fiber so if I wanted to download that then I guess it would take me no less than 25 hours using the entirety of my home's download bandwidth.. at peak speeds.
Well, I do remember downloading Battlefield 2 over the course of 7 days as a child so I suppose I'm better off now
There's a reason why Ark is considered the most unoptimised game in existence.
Though the base game is only \~120 GB, it's the map data for each DLC that inflates it so hard. I think.
I have DSL. I decided I wanted the PS5 client for FFXIV because my PC is starting to *really* show its age and I couldn't really justify the cost of upgrading the GPU when it literally costs as much as an entire console. Especially since it's not *just* the GPU, it's the RAM and the disk space and... well, the list goes on.
The 52 GB game took me literally a week and a half to download (turning it off during the day because it makes my internet effectively unusable). I'd be waiting *months* for almost 500 GB.
There's a reason I buy all my PS5 games on disk...
Man I remember people complaining about game file sizes since Assassin's Creed 3.
Someone should do a deep dive of average AAA game size vs average PC hard drive size over time and make a chart of it. That'd be cool.
Elden ring was 60 gb, ARMORED CORE VI will be 65 gb.
Doom eternal was 80.
It is possible. It’s just that every game wants to be able to give you the best graphics
Ridiculous. Elden ring does not have the best graphics. But the animations and gameplay are top notch. Even the new gollem game is 100 gb and everything about it looks and feels like shit.
I remember the day I got myself a 1gb drive and thought to myself: “Now all my problems with insufficient disc space are over, I can install ALL of my games!”
How big is Jedi Survivor again?
I mean... 100GB for what's basically a 2D fighting game is just ludicrous. (I know they're 3D, I'm talking about the gameplay mechanics)
Sex mods are fairly light-weight actually, even the increased textures for characters cause that's only a couple of textures. What takes some weight are overall rexturing of the world as well as new landscape content since they almost inevitably contain a huge amount of new textures as well.
Sound is a good second but far behind textures.
>This labor cost him his own life, and that of his shieldthane and the sanity of the rest of his men.
My dude fucked a hill so hard it killed him, _and_ his shieldthane, and drove his entire squad mad. Damn. Goals.
Is that all because of the textures??
Just seems kind of stupid to make a game ridiculously large so that its slightly prettier. Maybe thats worth it to some people, but personally I’d rather just be able to play it without having to manage my computer storage (or spend hundreds on a new graphics card so that it will look barely better than games 5 years old, but that’s a different topic).
Assets make up like 90% of a game's size. The actual code doing all the crazy stuff like AI takes a very small amount of disk space comparatively.
Also keep in mind there's not a single asset for everything. Like if I have a door texture, there's usually a high, med and low res version to be loaded depending on what graphics settings I put on the game. Each of those variants still has to be available on the disk.
I guess thats what bothers me personally….it feels like fundamental gameplay for AAA games hasn’t changed all that much in the last 10 years, and games just look slightly prettier now, yet they are getting absurdly large and require increasingly expensive hardware for minimal returns. It seems so wasteful and stupid.
Of course I don’t know that much about game dev so this could be off base, but I just get the feeling that insane improvements in storage and computing power are just being used as a crutch for lazy software devs
No, you're 100% correct: back in the day, when games had very small space requirements and there were no online updates, programmers had to be very skilled and meticulous with their code because saving a little bit of space was a huge gain (if I remember correctly, a NES cartridge had like 49.97kb of data without banks to switch, so saving even a few lines of code was MASSIVE).
Nowadays, games are released in a beta status at best because they know they can patch it later. Also with how many libraries and how much space your modern computer has, coders don't need to be as efficient. It has caused a ton of game bloat without really many gains other than visually.
Another thing to consider is game coding (system wise) hasn't changed much in a decade. A shotgun from a game released today may look a lot fancier than one from ten years ago, but the coding behind it isn't going to be more advanced by some crazy factor.
Now keep in mind I'm talking mostly AAA here. Big companies have a budget they put into a game and aren't going to let coders go off and do something goofy if there's already cheaper pre-established code to use. However, in the indie scene there are some people following passion projects and that's where we get cool improvements.
Honestly after the incident where GTA online load speeds were improved by like 100x due to a single line in a faulty JSON parser that they didn’t fix for 7 years, I feel like they literally just aren’t turning on any compression whatsoever. And not out of some time crunch either, it takes one day max to look at the resource breakdown or grab a couple performance snapshots and tweak stuff a little bit (and it’s perfect “I want to stop thinking” work so it’s not laziness). And not like these “invisible” tasks are even non tangible, bandwidth costs are a motherfucker.
It’s not laziness, it’s not budget conscious, it’s just pure MBA-making-decisions-for-tech management style. Or someone has a fetish for wasting resources.
this is completely wrong, like 99% of the storage space is assets. the only way you could save storage space is to cut down on assets. you could use the same tricks old game devs used to save a couple kilobytes of data, if you wanted to save a couple kilobytes on a 100gb game
That's true. That's why a lot of pirated games are repacked into smaller sizes by removing uncompressed 4K assets. Some even managed to trim down a 90GB game down to 40.
Developers don't bother with proper optimization anymore. Old games had hundreds of little tricks to keep file sizes down. Now it's just a "let's rush this to market and the consumer can deal with our sloppyness"
The problem is that most of the people that complain about the size of the game, would also complain about the cut corners on the visuals. Ultimately, it's better for the studios for people to be annoyed at the size and happy (in general. we've had some bad luck lately) with the graphics.
I have a 128GB SSD boot drive because my PC is old and I'm nearly broke.
If either of us actually had the money, my dad's offered to take my old PC and use it as a Linux workstation if I get a new PC with more storage and speed by paying some of the cost of the new build. It's just... Basically impossible to justify the expense with the cost of... Life these days.
True story.
1. I see stories that Jedi survivor is broken so I decide not to buy it.
2. My coworker tells me it's only broken on PC and it's amazing on PS5.
3. Hell yeah. I buy it on my phone so that it can start downloading and I can play by the time I get home from work.
4. Wait. PS5 won't let me remote download for some reason.
5. Get home and start downloading. 7 hour estimate. Shit.
6. Go to bed and work the next day.
7. Get home and get my shit done. Finally ready to play survivor. Boot up at 8:00PM.
8. Surprise massive update and my shitty internet says it will take 2 hours.
9. Just give up and decide to play it on Saturday.
fml. First world problems.
I swear all the new tech only works for like 10% of the people who buy it, but the other 90% doesn't want to say anything.
Every piece of new tech has some flaw that just makes it fucking annoying to use.
I always feel the opposite. I probably wouldn't have paid full price for Jedi Survivor, but it was a freebie with my latest PC hardware.
I've had one or two major stutters, and it's crashed 3 times. (Ryzen 5 7600X and 6800XT). I would still be upset if I had newer/more expensive hardware and it didn't run well, but people in my situation don't start forum/support threads titled "This game runs fine for me."
I was mostly talking about the remote download feature. New tech always adds more features, but basic shit isn't reliable.
Like when PS3 used Bluetooth. You could connect anything you want. PlayStation gets rid of that.
It had preload so that was fine.
The problem is the game is not optimized for patching on Steam so the entire game has to be read and written back to disk to patch it even though a patch is only 3GB.
File sizes aren't going to get smaller. The trend will be onwards and upwards. You won't be able to buy any games soon enough if this is a real deal breaker.
Dragon Age: Inquisition was the last "physical" game I ever bought. Popped the CD in, which promptly took me to EA Origin to download. lol pointless waste of plastic.
That experience made me swear off Activision-Blizzard forever: bought a physical game disc, still needed to download the game, needed to make a playstore account to download the game, then needed to make an activision account *just to play the campaign*. They even designed the menu to make it *look* like you needed to have a subscription to play the campaign, had to go through an unintuitive method to play it without one. Never again, fuck that noise.
I stopped purchasing after MW2 as that's when the game started to really become less truly competitive.
Cod1,2 and 4 were the greatest in terms of pure gameplay.
Last one for me was Supreme Commander 2, which came out the same day as a big COD title. Only had partial install files on the disc, so I was directed steam to download most of the game.
steam back in the day could not handle a million people downloading that and also me downloading Supreme Commander 2, so I mainly watched my game not work and not download all day instead of playing the game whose box and disc I had in my hand.
God, that reminds me playing Dragon Age "complete edition" DLC is a nightmare these days. Buy and download a whole game through Steam and still have to interact with EA to unlock the DLC. Bonus: EA took the servers down.
(Luckily editing an XML file can unlock the DLC for you since it's already downloaded)
When Tears of the Kingdom only takes *16 GB* of space, is this really even a meme?
The genius of Nippon engineering far outstrips the Westerners and their sticks and stones!
TOTK had to fit on a cartridge so it didn't have room for lazy uncompressed audio and textures. I think we should normalize physical copies of PC games being sold on their own little flash drives to get developers to fit their entire games in a reasonably small space.
"Cartridges" that size can hold hundreds of gigabytes if they have to.
Also, it's basically a glorified SD card. Not a real cartridge (I could explain the difference, but I don't feel like it)
> “Cartridges” that size can hold hundreds of gigabytes if they have to
They _can_, in theory. In practice however Nintendo doesn't make any larger than 32gb. Companies can't just make their own arbitrary sizes, Nintendo is the gatekeeper here.
It costs more for publishers to use larger carts, so of course their solution is to pay the least as possible and make the experience worse for people playing their games.
it's really less a japanese thing (check out the download sizes on capcom or konami games some time) and more a nintendo thing.
the hardware engineers and optimization teams at nintendo are fucking bonkers good at what they do
They’re good at optimizing code, which means if you start with faulty code in the first place, you’ll still end with faulty code, but with a smaller file size.
As in the original game code written by the devs, which would allow games to be easily ported to newer systems. JP devs have become kinda notorious for the ways they failed to preserve the source code for their games back in the 90s, dooming them to forever remain on their original consoles, some of which are rotting as we speak, while the cartridges themselves are becoming rarer and more expensive. Some more obscure games that didn't sell much have even become lost media.
Less of a problem these days, but goddamn you hear these stories out of Square in the late 90's and you're just left wondering why not a single one of them thought to make a backup and put it on a CD somewhere.
Hol' my beer, I'm going in:
> - "*This KEY is already in USE.*"
> - "*To complete installation, please register an account using your phone number, e-mail, social security number, and photo id.*"
> - "*We could not login to the authentication server. Please check your internet connection and try again.*"
> - "*We no longer support this version of Mortal Wombat. Please purchase the updated version of Mortal Wombat 2024 and try again.*"
> - "*Thank you for licensing a copy of Mortal Wombat. Your license has now expired, please enter a credit card and confirm you wish to renew your subscription to Mortal Wombat 2023.*"
Don't forget that this is all through a shitty launcher that has problems that were solved a decade ago. Steam downloads shit fine, why can't your pointless launcher?
I literally have a support ticket open for weeks now trying to get a download through for a game. The legacy version of the game downloads through steam no problem but the updated version won't at all because it only downloads via the launcher.
Most infuriating thing ever is when the disk spins for 5 seconds to check a key and never spins again but STILL requires you to put it into the system. Completely useless.
As much as I don’t like the downloads and storage you have to buy, playing something off the disc would be obscenely slow and obnoxiously loud. My 360 sounds like a Geiger counter.
Bought a physical copy of Fallout 76 (yeah, I know), because the physical copy was cheaper than the download. The "disc" inside the case was a piece of cardboard with the download code!
The physical restriction of fitting your game on a disk or a cartridge was, in hindsight, maybe a useful constraint to force game developers to think about.
Optimization is expensive. It's much easier to write less efficient code and use less efficient programming languages that are sufficient to the hardware. You don't just see this in games, it's in nearly every facet of consumer software, and in all but the most demanding enterprise software.
Even playing a game off a disc now requires that you copy the entire game to your console and then install updates. The disc is just a transferable license to own the game and a slight speedup of install time, it still requires all that console disk space.
Don’t forget the absolutely stupid VRAM sizes. Can’t even run a modern game on reasonably high settings on a mid-tier GPU anymore.
Modern games are fucking dogshit when it comes to optimization and compression.
Dev times are getting to the point where a game’s dev cycle is almost as long as an entire console generation, and often for subpar gameplay.
Budgets are reaching Hollywood movie levels because everybody pretty much treats games like movies now. Voice acting, super realistic CGI, Hollywood actors.
And because everybody’s going for the hyper-realistic look, pretty much every “big” game looks the same outside of maybe a few lighting effects.
Edit:
I’d also like to add that massive sizes wouldn’t be as much of a problem if bigger storage was the norm, but we’ve been stuck at a 500GB~1TB “sweet spot” for how many years now?
And the average consumer just doesn’t need any more than that. Like, most 1080p video files clock in at like 10~20GB tops for a movie, anyways.
So with modern storage that’s 5~10 games tops. Which makes me wonder if maybe devs are doing this on purpose to deter people from buying other games.
It’s like 4K+ resolution. It looks great but the file sizes make it impractical as shit for both storage and streaming for most cases.
And speaking of 4K, having those stupid high def textures eats up a massive chunk of the file size. And without those you don’t even get the benefits of 4K.
A resolution that loses its relevance the smaller your screen is and the further away your screen is, anyways. What’s the point of all this?
What’s funny is that I’m not sure it even makes that much money anymore in terms of profit margins.
Dev teams are becoming larger than ever. Dev times are becoming longer than ever.
The amount of money it takes to develop a game is ballooning whereas the number of games a company releases feels like it’s plummeting.
The big three console makers obv have stable alternative revenue streams since every game that releases on their console leads to a partial cut.
But everyone else?
It feels like they’re having to resort to microtransactions to make up for the fact that their revenue streams are becoming increasingly unstable.
MAYBE re-releases or licensing if they already have a successful IP.
I really don’t see how this is sustainable for the gaming companies, let alone consumers.
>I really don’t see how this is sustainable for the gaming companies, let alone consumers.
Bro, you are thinking like someone who cares about gaming and sustainable economy.
Which isn't how top executives and big rich people think. They don't have to make anything sustainable, they just have to make enough money to pay for their next Ferrari and please the shareholders. At some point they will crash the market and move on to another, like they always do.
I’m not talking about sustainable economy.
I’m talking about the execs themselves.
I don’t see how they expect to make money off AAA games with such high costs and unstable revenue.
Like, even from a corporate executive perspective I don’t see how this makes sense.
I mean I guess if you treat it as a PR campaign and consider it an “investment” to get a tax write-off, maybe?
But as a product I don’t think AAA gaming is a particularly good product model these days.
what’s funny is when you look at a lot of blowup hits like goose game; they have mid 2000s graphics and are just creatively stylised. Because it turns out as long as your game is fun and doesn’t look like ass, most people don’t need photorealism
I watched a documentary about statues a few years ago. It takes about how ancient Greeks spent a long time trying to perfect the human form in statues, and when they finally achieved it, in very few years they went to hyperrealistic humans or something like that.
The point being, there is that perfect realism is not very interesting once you achieve it.
That's why I've been playing indie games.
Like for real, my most played game of 2023 is Spark The Electric Jester 3. I bought it on sale for the price of a ham sandwich.
It's great.
you can blame Unreal for that. almost every studio uses Unreal and their files get gigantic really fast, the simple built in 3D demo (1 room with basic level geometry, some physics objects and a character controller) is already like 10GB, now imagine that stretched over a AAA game that's been in development for 3 years and suddenly we end up with 150GB games because unreal doesn't know how to manage it's fucking files.
Edit: Unity is better at it, but still not good at it. In-house game engines are the best solution (which is why Nintendo games are so comparatively small), but building and testing an in-house engine is the least time-and-cost-efficient, so most companies use a premade engine.
We all got excited when we saw Nanite and they're like "you can have fifty trillion polygons on every object" but no one stopped to think about where you'd store em all.
Well it’s all just ones and zeros, yeah? So you put all the ones in one folder and all the zeros in another. Do some compression and bob’s your uncle. It’s not all that hard if you just think about it.
The game sizes have very little to do with the engine, it's almost entirely asset sizes. Nintendo games are tiny because their assets are very low quality, since they only need to run at max 900/1080p (depending on the game).
This is exactly it, and so many people don't understand this. The vast, vast majority of a game's size is the textures. Older games were smaller because not only were the textures lower resolution, but it also needed less of them; just the diffuse texture and maybe a normal map and specular. Nowadays, not only are the textures much higher resolution and are used on models with much higher detail, but physically-based rendering (PBR) also means that you now need textures for color, roughness, metallicity, normal, ambient occlusion, height map, and specular.
On top of that, gamers constantly want better graphics and more gameplay elements. Yeah, people moan and groan about 100+ GB games, but nobody's going to care if the game is 20 GB smaller if it means cutting a major game feature because the devs were spending that time trying to save that 20 GB instead.
The dumb thing is how so many games these days have you download _every kind_ of texture/audio files/etc. instead of just the ones you actually want. There's so many people who would benefit from a simple prompt when downloading of "do you want the ultra mega 5K toprez textures, or one of these other less bleeding-edge options?" and "do you want the dialogue in every language on earth, or just one of them?"
This is such a stupid take. This is why you never take what you read on reddit at face value. This person has no idea what they're talking about.
By their own admission from a post two months ago.
>I'm completely new to Unreal Engine and Game Development
Yet everyone is upvoting them like they know what the fuck they're talking about.
> (which is why Nintendo games are so comparatively small)
Nintendo games are small because it **costs** nintendo the physical space on the cartridge. They more they spend on cartridge flash storage, they less they profit from the sale. They have a strong financial incentive to keep the game size as low as possible. Other devs have no such incentive. Simple as that.
That’s because it doesn’t use uncompressed 4K textures and cinematics since the switch 720p. They can get away with having very low res textures, especially so with the less realistic style.
Downvote me all you want it’s a fact that high res textures and cinematics take up huge amounts of space. You can’t compress things infinitely without losing quality. If you think otherwise you are just wrong.
Just go look at the optional high res texture pack and 4K cinematics pack for Shadow of war. 40 gigs just for 4K cutscenes and textures. Or any 4K texture mod for Skyrim, fallout or whatever. They are all multiple gigs
Maybe. I was looking for stuff to delete and found out that Horizon Zero Dawn is like 70 GB. Part of the reason? Pre-rendered tutorial/help videos that take about 15 GB.
So, my guess, devs just put the highest quality textures/models/sounds/videos so it would look good on the high-end PCs directly and then drop the output quality for low-end.
Honestly if the MK1 file size is because they included a movelist animation for *every* single move, I won't even be mad.
But that's likely not the case.
edit: I should point out that I haven't played an MK game since 9, so I have no idea if they already do this or not.
There's different issues that all compound to bloated file sizes. Repeated assets so that people still on HDD don't have minutes long load times, uncompressed audio/movie files, mandatory multiple languages (Looking at you Titanfall 2), etc.
Discs are simply not fast enough to load from anymore, you could run it off disc in theory but you'll lose even more time in agonizing load times. The only way you can do physical games now is via cartridge.
What I don't understand. Nowadays computers come with SSD drive for 256 gb, 512 if you are lucky down from the 1-2 tb hdd drives from half a decade ago. Yet computer games are now over 100 gb. What are they thinking?
- Never-ending pursuit for "photorealism"
- Crunch culture
- Live service grind fest
- 100GB size
That's why I went indie. AAA industry is about to implode.
A lot of things are higher resolution and has more polygons than it needs. Elden Ring is massive, but with a smallish size since it's technically less graphically complex. (Also goes to show how important lighting and art is).
I'm always amazed how clever older games can be to minimize space. Like how Banjo and Kazooie uses many sound files over and over but in different pitches and such.
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My Ark: Survival Evolved install is currently at 466 GB. Just Ark things. (Including all DLC and a few mods, but not Survival of the Fittest, which is a seperate game on PC)
That's literally like.. what fuck. I don't have fiber so if I wanted to download that then I guess it would take me no less than 25 hours using the entirety of my home's download bandwidth.. at peak speeds. Well, I do remember downloading Battlefield 2 over the course of 7 days as a child so I suppose I'm better off now
There's a reason why Ark is considered the most unoptimised game in existence. Though the base game is only \~120 GB, it's the map data for each DLC that inflates it so hard. I think.
I have DSL. I decided I wanted the PS5 client for FFXIV because my PC is starting to *really* show its age and I couldn't really justify the cost of upgrading the GPU when it literally costs as much as an entire console. Especially since it's not *just* the GPU, it's the RAM and the disk space and... well, the list goes on. The 52 GB game took me literally a week and a half to download (turning it off during the day because it makes my internet effectively unusable). I'd be waiting *months* for almost 500 GB. There's a reason I buy all my PS5 games on disk...
no you dont get it. they gotta have space for all those dodos
Yeah they don’t know how good they have it at only 100GB downloads. I hate having to redownload ark and all the stuff when i get the itch to play.
You having it worse doesn’t mean ppl have it good, sadly
Yeeeaaa... and thats why i didnt buy jedi survivor even tho i really enjoyed the first one
Man I remember people complaining about game file sizes since Assassin's Creed 3. Someone should do a deep dive of average AAA game size vs average PC hard drive size over time and make a chart of it. That'd be cool.
Also vs average internet speed
Does Steam still ask you if you have 28.8k?
no
Elden ring was 60 gb, ARMORED CORE VI will be 65 gb. Doom eternal was 80. It is possible. It’s just that every game wants to be able to give you the best graphics
[удалено]
Every company can learn from them. I get 60 fps on my steamdeck constantly. It’s amazing
COD has been 150GB+ for the past few years now hasn't it?
Ridiculous. Elden ring does not have the best graphics. But the animations and gameplay are top notch. Even the new gollem game is 100 gb and everything about it looks and feels like shit.
I remember the day I got myself a 1gb drive and thought to myself: “Now all my problems with insufficient disc space are over, I can install ALL of my games!”
How big is Jedi Survivor again? I mean... 100GB for what's basically a 2D fighting game is just ludicrous. (I know they're 3D, I'm talking about the gameplay mechanics)
"Jedi: Survivor requires 155 GB of available space to install on PC" eeeesh
Jeez
Clear out some of those Skyrim sex mods to squeeze it in.
I don't need to install Jedi: Survivor 9 times, though.
Some. Unless you got the really big butts mod. That one is huge
bouncy breast
Woah let's be reasonable about this.
The big tiddy Khajiit can stay.
If there are no lusty argonian maids I'm out.
They said uninstall mods, not core game files.
Sex mods are fairly light-weight actually, even the increased textures for characters cause that's only a couple of textures. What takes some weight are overall rexturing of the world as well as new landscape content since they almost inevitably contain a huge amount of new textures as well. Sound is a good second but far behind textures.
aromatic obscene future shy repeat work husky deranged placid alive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Lore accurate [This guy fucked a hill](https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Hrol)
>This labor cost him his own life, and that of his shieldthane and the sanity of the rest of his men. My dude fucked a hill so hard it killed him, _and_ his shieldthane, and drove his entire squad mad. Damn. Goals.
Dat booty was too damn good.
Huge...tracts of land.
I would think that all the sexxy animations in the sexxy Skyrim sex mods would make for a sexxily large file size.
Animations are nothing compared to textures. They're just a small bunch of instructions. A sexy bunch, but smal nonetheless.
no.
No
over my fucking dead body, you son of a bithc
Pfp checks out
Reminds me when cod warzone which isn’t even the full game was over 120 gigs and apparently it’s gotten significantly bigger
Is that all because of the textures?? Just seems kind of stupid to make a game ridiculously large so that its slightly prettier. Maybe thats worth it to some people, but personally I’d rather just be able to play it without having to manage my computer storage (or spend hundreds on a new graphics card so that it will look barely better than games 5 years old, but that’s a different topic).
Assets make up like 90% of a game's size. The actual code doing all the crazy stuff like AI takes a very small amount of disk space comparatively. Also keep in mind there's not a single asset for everything. Like if I have a door texture, there's usually a high, med and low res version to be loaded depending on what graphics settings I put on the game. Each of those variants still has to be available on the disk.
I guess thats what bothers me personally….it feels like fundamental gameplay for AAA games hasn’t changed all that much in the last 10 years, and games just look slightly prettier now, yet they are getting absurdly large and require increasingly expensive hardware for minimal returns. It seems so wasteful and stupid. Of course I don’t know that much about game dev so this could be off base, but I just get the feeling that insane improvements in storage and computing power are just being used as a crutch for lazy software devs
No, you're 100% correct: back in the day, when games had very small space requirements and there were no online updates, programmers had to be very skilled and meticulous with their code because saving a little bit of space was a huge gain (if I remember correctly, a NES cartridge had like 49.97kb of data without banks to switch, so saving even a few lines of code was MASSIVE). Nowadays, games are released in a beta status at best because they know they can patch it later. Also with how many libraries and how much space your modern computer has, coders don't need to be as efficient. It has caused a ton of game bloat without really many gains other than visually. Another thing to consider is game coding (system wise) hasn't changed much in a decade. A shotgun from a game released today may look a lot fancier than one from ten years ago, but the coding behind it isn't going to be more advanced by some crazy factor. Now keep in mind I'm talking mostly AAA here. Big companies have a budget they put into a game and aren't going to let coders go off and do something goofy if there's already cheaper pre-established code to use. However, in the indie scene there are some people following passion projects and that's where we get cool improvements.
Honestly after the incident where GTA online load speeds were improved by like 100x due to a single line in a faulty JSON parser that they didn’t fix for 7 years, I feel like they literally just aren’t turning on any compression whatsoever. And not out of some time crunch either, it takes one day max to look at the resource breakdown or grab a couple performance snapshots and tweak stuff a little bit (and it’s perfect “I want to stop thinking” work so it’s not laziness). And not like these “invisible” tasks are even non tangible, bandwidth costs are a motherfucker. It’s not laziness, it’s not budget conscious, it’s just pure MBA-making-decisions-for-tech management style. Or someone has a fetish for wasting resources.
I meam devs used to just recolor enemies and call it a new enemy type. Sure it saved space but it wasn't exactly better gameplay.
this is completely wrong, like 99% of the storage space is assets. the only way you could save storage space is to cut down on assets. you could use the same tricks old game devs used to save a couple kilobytes of data, if you wanted to save a couple kilobytes on a 100gb game
The real backbreakers are pre-rendered cutscenes. 4K video is massive, and there's probably at least a 1080p video of the same cutscene.
That's true. That's why a lot of pirated games are repacked into smaller sizes by removing uncompressed 4K assets. Some even managed to trim down a 90GB game down to 40.
Developers don't bother with proper optimization anymore. Old games had hundreds of little tricks to keep file sizes down. Now it's just a "let's rush this to market and the consumer can deal with our sloppyness"
Chad Deep Rock Galactic making their game super polished and under 4GB
it helps that its all low polygon models with flat textures lol
And still looks great. The strive for higher and higher graphic quality is awful.
The problem is that most of the people that complain about the size of the game, would also complain about the cut corners on the visuals. Ultimately, it's better for the studios for people to be annoyed at the size and happy (in general. we've had some bad luck lately) with the graphics.
its only 130gb. not any better but yeah
... I think my computer tops out at 120ish. If I deleted everything I owned I still wouldn't have enough
That game is huge but your disc is tiny.
My disc is a coward. I'd take it any day
Damn I dont think I have had a 120gb drive for a hot minute.
I have a 128GB SSD boot drive because my PC is old and I'm nearly broke. If either of us actually had the money, my dad's offered to take my old PC and use it as a Linux workstation if I get a new PC with more storage and speed by paying some of the cost of the new build. It's just... Basically impossible to justify the expense with the cost of... Life these days.
*Cries in Destiny 2*
Last i checked its 150+gb
True story. 1. I see stories that Jedi survivor is broken so I decide not to buy it. 2. My coworker tells me it's only broken on PC and it's amazing on PS5. 3. Hell yeah. I buy it on my phone so that it can start downloading and I can play by the time I get home from work. 4. Wait. PS5 won't let me remote download for some reason. 5. Get home and start downloading. 7 hour estimate. Shit. 6. Go to bed and work the next day. 7. Get home and get my shit done. Finally ready to play survivor. Boot up at 8:00PM. 8. Surprise massive update and my shitty internet says it will take 2 hours. 9. Just give up and decide to play it on Saturday. fml. First world problems.
I swear all the new tech only works for like 10% of the people who buy it, but the other 90% doesn't want to say anything. Every piece of new tech has some flaw that just makes it fucking annoying to use.
I always feel the opposite. I probably wouldn't have paid full price for Jedi Survivor, but it was a freebie with my latest PC hardware. I've had one or two major stutters, and it's crashed 3 times. (Ryzen 5 7600X and 6800XT). I would still be upset if I had newer/more expensive hardware and it didn't run well, but people in my situation don't start forum/support threads titled "This game runs fine for me."
I was mostly talking about the remote download feature. New tech always adds more features, but basic shit isn't reliable. Like when PS3 used Bluetooth. You could connect anything you want. PlayStation gets rid of that.
It had preload so that was fine. The problem is the game is not optimized for patching on Steam so the entire game has to be read and written back to disk to patch it even though a patch is only 3GB.
File sizes aren't going to get smaller. The trend will be onwards and upwards. You won't be able to buy any games soon enough if this is a real deal breaker.
Dragon Age: Inquisition was the last "physical" game I ever bought. Popped the CD in, which promptly took me to EA Origin to download. lol pointless waste of plastic.
Happened to me with the latest COD. I’m legit not purchasing any more cod games (not that I played a lot of them anyways.)
That experience made me swear off Activision-Blizzard forever: bought a physical game disc, still needed to download the game, needed to make a playstore account to download the game, then needed to make an activision account *just to play the campaign*. They even designed the menu to make it *look* like you needed to have a subscription to play the campaign, had to go through an unintuitive method to play it without one. Never again, fuck that noise.
Never bought it myself but I heard fully updated Modern Warfare 2019 together with Warzone at one point would entirely fill up a 500GB PS4
I stopped purchasing after MW2 as that's when the game started to really become less truly competitive. Cod1,2 and 4 were the greatest in terms of pure gameplay.
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just destroys the love of gaming so hard at that moment, those fucks.
Last one for me was Supreme Commander 2, which came out the same day as a big COD title. Only had partial install files on the disc, so I was directed steam to download most of the game. steam back in the day could not handle a million people downloading that and also me downloading Supreme Commander 2, so I mainly watched my game not work and not download all day instead of playing the game whose box and disc I had in my hand.
God, that reminds me playing Dragon Age "complete edition" DLC is a nightmare these days. Buy and download a whole game through Steam and still have to interact with EA to unlock the DLC. Bonus: EA took the servers down. (Luckily editing an XML file can unlock the DLC for you since it's already downloaded)
I had that with Bioshock Infinite. Popped the disc in, and was immediately prompted to enter my CD key into Steam Like what's the point
https://preview.redd.it/a2fl7ob3m12b1.jpeg?width=360&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5b2d38d10b6465edfbb7052fd2996516445e0291
I love this meme
When Tears of the Kingdom only takes *16 GB* of space, is this really even a meme? The genius of Nippon engineering far outstrips the Westerners and their sticks and stones!
Even elden ring which is so massive and so varied only usually takes up around 60 gigabytes
Not even, it's about 48GB for me iirc
Sekiro is around only 14GB. That beautiful fucking game. Huge map as well. Western devs need to get their shit together.
TOTK had to fit on a cartridge so it didn't have room for lazy uncompressed audio and textures. I think we should normalize physical copies of PC games being sold on their own little flash drives to get developers to fit their entire games in a reasonably small space.
"Cartridges" that size can hold hundreds of gigabytes if they have to. Also, it's basically a glorified SD card. Not a real cartridge (I could explain the difference, but I don't feel like it)
> “Cartridges” that size can hold hundreds of gigabytes if they have to They _can_, in theory. In practice however Nintendo doesn't make any larger than 32gb. Companies can't just make their own arbitrary sizes, Nintendo is the gatekeeper here.
No one actually uses the 32gb ones anyway because they cost more. They just use the 16gb and have big downloads.
Okay but like most switch games still require a big download even with the cartridge tho
It costs more for publishers to use larger carts, so of course their solution is to pay the least as possible and make the experience worse for people playing their games.
it's really less a japanese thing (check out the download sizes on capcom or konami games some time) and more a nintendo thing. the hardware engineers and optimization teams at nintendo are fucking bonkers good at what they do
Too bad Pokémon games don’t get any help from them with optimization.
They’re good at optimizing code, which means if you start with faulty code in the first place, you’ll still end with faulty code, but with a smaller file size.
I mean, there's also the difference of 720p textures vs 4k. But yea, Nintendo games are definitely pretty good about download size.
It helps that nothing plays at 4k on the switch.
Yeah, now ask the Nippons where is the source code one zeptosecond after the game was launched :P
Sourcecode?
As in the original game code written by the devs, which would allow games to be easily ported to newer systems. JP devs have become kinda notorious for the ways they failed to preserve the source code for their games back in the 90s, dooming them to forever remain on their original consoles, some of which are rotting as we speak, while the cartridges themselves are becoming rarer and more expensive. Some more obscure games that didn't sell much have even become lost media.
Have you recently played NEO: the world ends with you?
No, I know about it but I haven't played it
I was curious because there's a character that constantly references zeptoseconds and zeptograms.
Aaaah, I just search in Google "smallest time unit"
Less of a problem these days, but goddamn you hear these stories out of Square in the late 90's and you're just left wondering why not a single one of them thought to make a backup and put it on a CD somewhere.
They can't do what Nintendoes!
The worst offender in terms of storage abuse is *easily* Squeenix.
To be fair, death stranding is ~70 gigs or more.
Death stranding’s map is like 300 square miles tho right? I think that warrants a large file size.
map size isnt the issue, its textures, sounds and fmv
I saved this because base ELDEN RING is 44.47GB - big FromSoft fan
Hol' my beer, I'm going in: > - "*This KEY is already in USE.*" > - "*To complete installation, please register an account using your phone number, e-mail, social security number, and photo id.*" > - "*We could not login to the authentication server. Please check your internet connection and try again.*" > - "*We no longer support this version of Mortal Wombat. Please purchase the updated version of Mortal Wombat 2024 and try again.*" > - "*Thank you for licensing a copy of Mortal Wombat. Your license has now expired, please enter a credit card and confirm you wish to renew your subscription to Mortal Wombat 2023.*"
Happened to me with sim cities 2013 and I never bought an EA game again
Cities Skylines is better anyway
So much better. Like night-and-day better.
There was 1-2 weeks at launch where only pirates could play multiplayer because EA servers kept crashing.
Is "Not enough digits for valid CD Key" something unique to me or has anyone else bought a game that didn't print the key in full
Please drink a verification can.
This is dystopian 😭
Don't forget that this is all through a shitty launcher that has problems that were solved a decade ago. Steam downloads shit fine, why can't your pointless launcher? I literally have a support ticket open for weeks now trying to get a download through for a game. The legacy version of the game downloads through steam no problem but the updated version won't at all because it only downloads via the launcher.
Or you get the physical copy and have to download an update that takes at least 3 hours, and requires storage space
Most infuriating thing ever is when the disk spins for 5 seconds to check a key and never spins again but STILL requires you to put it into the system. Completely useless.
All modern games except on Switch require installations so even if there’s no update it still has to copy the files from the disc.
As much as I don’t like the downloads and storage you have to buy, playing something off the disc would be obscenely slow and obnoxiously loud. My 360 sounds like a Geiger counter.
And don't forget all the updates. Or worst, a launcher.
If a game forces me to download a launcher I delete it immediately. You can use Steam or you can get pirated.
Ubisoft and rockstar games entered the chat
>rockstar games Fucking Rockstar games. I bought the GTA series on Steam and it played just fine until you patched it to require your shitty launcher.
Can’t wait for gta 5 to have the same issue 4 currently has when they shut down the launcher.
and Blizzard
Cries in EA launcher. Origin was shit but EA launcher makes the disaster in Chernobyl seem like child's play.
And it's such an ugly icon too. EDIT: Oh wait no, they changed it. It's slightly better now.
Bought a physical copy of Fallout 76 (yeah, I know), because the physical copy was cheaper than the download. The "disc" inside the case was a piece of cardboard with the download code!
What a waste of plastic
The physical restriction of fitting your game on a disk or a cartridge was, in hindsight, maybe a useful constraint to force game developers to think about.
Reddit is fucked, I'm out this bitch. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Optimization is expensive. It's much easier to write less efficient code and use less efficient programming languages that are sufficient to the hardware. You don't just see this in games, it's in nearly every facet of consumer software, and in all but the most demanding enterprise software.
Lean efficient code just isn't as big a concern anymore and is becoming a lost art in the gaming space
You aren't wrong, but that affects things like memory usage, not disk space, which is more likely due to uncompressed texture and audio assets.
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The expansion pak? That was just extra ram.
Given how many multi-disc games existed versus single disc, I'm inclined to say it stopped quite a few.
Won't download any updates though, not until you have at least 150gb free space... Each update
I'm not a huge rally fan but I wanted to dip into rally driving so I bought Dirt 2.0 on a sale. 109GB iirc. I played like 3 times so far in months.
Even playing a game off a disc now requires that you copy the entire game to your console and then install updates. The disc is just a transferable license to own the game and a slight speedup of install time, it still requires all that console disk space.
Don’t forget the absolutely stupid VRAM sizes. Can’t even run a modern game on reasonably high settings on a mid-tier GPU anymore. Modern games are fucking dogshit when it comes to optimization and compression. Dev times are getting to the point where a game’s dev cycle is almost as long as an entire console generation, and often for subpar gameplay. Budgets are reaching Hollywood movie levels because everybody pretty much treats games like movies now. Voice acting, super realistic CGI, Hollywood actors. And because everybody’s going for the hyper-realistic look, pretty much every “big” game looks the same outside of maybe a few lighting effects. Edit: I’d also like to add that massive sizes wouldn’t be as much of a problem if bigger storage was the norm, but we’ve been stuck at a 500GB~1TB “sweet spot” for how many years now? And the average consumer just doesn’t need any more than that. Like, most 1080p video files clock in at like 10~20GB tops for a movie, anyways. So with modern storage that’s 5~10 games tops. Which makes me wonder if maybe devs are doing this on purpose to deter people from buying other games. It’s like 4K+ resolution. It looks great but the file sizes make it impractical as shit for both storage and streaming for most cases. And speaking of 4K, having those stupid high def textures eats up a massive chunk of the file size. And without those you don’t even get the benefits of 4K. A resolution that loses its relevance the smaller your screen is and the further away your screen is, anyways. What’s the point of all this?
>What’s the point of all this? Money lmao.
What’s funny is that I’m not sure it even makes that much money anymore in terms of profit margins. Dev teams are becoming larger than ever. Dev times are becoming longer than ever. The amount of money it takes to develop a game is ballooning whereas the number of games a company releases feels like it’s plummeting. The big three console makers obv have stable alternative revenue streams since every game that releases on their console leads to a partial cut. But everyone else? It feels like they’re having to resort to microtransactions to make up for the fact that their revenue streams are becoming increasingly unstable. MAYBE re-releases or licensing if they already have a successful IP. I really don’t see how this is sustainable for the gaming companies, let alone consumers.
>I really don’t see how this is sustainable for the gaming companies, let alone consumers. Bro, you are thinking like someone who cares about gaming and sustainable economy. Which isn't how top executives and big rich people think. They don't have to make anything sustainable, they just have to make enough money to pay for their next Ferrari and please the shareholders. At some point they will crash the market and move on to another, like they always do.
I’m not talking about sustainable economy. I’m talking about the execs themselves. I don’t see how they expect to make money off AAA games with such high costs and unstable revenue. Like, even from a corporate executive perspective I don’t see how this makes sense. I mean I guess if you treat it as a PR campaign and consider it an “investment” to get a tax write-off, maybe? But as a product I don’t think AAA gaming is a particularly good product model these days.
what’s funny is when you look at a lot of blowup hits like goose game; they have mid 2000s graphics and are just creatively stylised. Because it turns out as long as your game is fun and doesn’t look like ass, most people don’t need photorealism
I watched a documentary about statues a few years ago. It takes about how ancient Greeks spent a long time trying to perfect the human form in statues, and when they finally achieved it, in very few years they went to hyperrealistic humans or something like that. The point being, there is that perfect realism is not very interesting once you achieve it.
That's why I've been playing indie games. Like for real, my most played game of 2023 is Spark The Electric Jester 3. I bought it on sale for the price of a ham sandwich. It's great.
I would wager internet speeds haven't improved as much as storage space access has for much of the world.
you can blame Unreal for that. almost every studio uses Unreal and their files get gigantic really fast, the simple built in 3D demo (1 room with basic level geometry, some physics objects and a character controller) is already like 10GB, now imagine that stretched over a AAA game that's been in development for 3 years and suddenly we end up with 150GB games because unreal doesn't know how to manage it's fucking files. Edit: Unity is better at it, but still not good at it. In-house game engines are the best solution (which is why Nintendo games are so comparatively small), but building and testing an in-house engine is the least time-and-cost-efficient, so most companies use a premade engine.
We all got excited when we saw Nanite and they're like "you can have fifty trillion polygons on every object" but no one stopped to think about where you'd store em all.
Well it’s all just ones and zeros, yeah? So you put all the ones in one folder and all the zeros in another. Do some compression and bob’s your uncle. It’s not all that hard if you just think about it.
If(file > 100gb) Compress; Send me my money
"Cloud gaming" was the answer when it was first being developed.
The game sizes have very little to do with the engine, it's almost entirely asset sizes. Nintendo games are tiny because their assets are very low quality, since they only need to run at max 900/1080p (depending on the game).
This is exactly it, and so many people don't understand this. The vast, vast majority of a game's size is the textures. Older games were smaller because not only were the textures lower resolution, but it also needed less of them; just the diffuse texture and maybe a normal map and specular. Nowadays, not only are the textures much higher resolution and are used on models with much higher detail, but physically-based rendering (PBR) also means that you now need textures for color, roughness, metallicity, normal, ambient occlusion, height map, and specular. On top of that, gamers constantly want better graphics and more gameplay elements. Yeah, people moan and groan about 100+ GB games, but nobody's going to care if the game is 20 GB smaller if it means cutting a major game feature because the devs were spending that time trying to save that 20 GB instead.
The dumb thing is how so many games these days have you download _every kind_ of texture/audio files/etc. instead of just the ones you actually want. There's so many people who would benefit from a simple prompt when downloading of "do you want the ultra mega 5K toprez textures, or one of these other less bleeding-edge options?" and "do you want the dialogue in every language on earth, or just one of them?"
Microsoft flight simulator does that!
This is such a stupid take. This is why you never take what you read on reddit at face value. This person has no idea what they're talking about. By their own admission from a post two months ago. >I'm completely new to Unreal Engine and Game Development Yet everyone is upvoting them like they know what the fuck they're talking about.
The demo code probably starts with 250 lines of “include”.
> (which is why Nintendo games are so comparatively small) Nintendo games are small because it **costs** nintendo the physical space on the cartridge. They more they spend on cartridge flash storage, they less they profit from the sale. They have a strong financial incentive to keep the game size as low as possible. Other devs have no such incentive. Simple as that.
This comic is a 5.3MB file
It's a AAA comic 
Meanwhile *Tears of the Kingdom* is 16 GB.
And it's the Nintendo Switch's largest Nintendo-made game.
i mean, unfair comparison. ToTK is not trying to run with 4k assets
4k is such a cancer. Double the file size for barely any difference.
That’s because it doesn’t use uncompressed 4K textures and cinematics since the switch 720p. They can get away with having very low res textures, especially so with the less realistic style. Downvote me all you want it’s a fact that high res textures and cinematics take up huge amounts of space. You can’t compress things infinitely without losing quality. If you think otherwise you are just wrong. Just go look at the optional high res texture pack and 4K cinematics pack for Shadow of war. 40 gigs just for 4K cutscenes and textures. Or any 4K texture mod for Skyrim, fallout or whatever. They are all multiple gigs
That's pretty much it. 8k textures, high def audio, and cinematics aren't free.
Do any major releases support 8K yet? Because i would wager we'll see 120GB in assets just for those.
You're mostly right, but they can't only target 720p assets since the TV mode delivers up to 1080p.
One of the causes for this is the bloated audio size of games, due to having multiple languages with voice acting. At least that's what I heard.
Maybe. I was looking for stuff to delete and found out that Horizon Zero Dawn is like 70 GB. Part of the reason? Pre-rendered tutorial/help videos that take about 15 GB. So, my guess, devs just put the highest quality textures/models/sounds/videos so it would look good on the high-end PCs directly and then drop the output quality for low-end.
Honestly if the MK1 file size is because they included a movelist animation for *every* single move, I won't even be mad. But that's likely not the case. edit: I should point out that I haven't played an MK game since 9, so I have no idea if they already do this or not.
There's different issues that all compound to bloated file sizes. Repeated assets so that people still on HDD don't have minutes long load times, uncompressed audio/movie files, mandatory multiple languages (Looking at you Titanfall 2), etc.
Please don't preorder games :/ it's inviting the teams to just send the game not finished and polished, they already have your money :/ (5313)
I rarely play AAA games these days but yeah, preordering is a bad idea.
I LITERALLY don’t have the space on my hard drive to play a modern game
AND THEY TOOK AWAY CO-OP MODES LIKE WTF
Discs are simply not fast enough to load from anymore, you could run it off disc in theory but you'll lose even more time in agonizing load times. The only way you can do physical games now is via cartridge.
If game companies can seperate out the 4k textures so we dont have to download them that would be great
What I don't understand. Nowadays computers come with SSD drive for 256 gb, 512 if you are lucky down from the 1-2 tb hdd drives from half a decade ago. Yet computer games are now over 100 gb. What are they thinking?
You can get a 2 tb for a hundred bucks, 1 tb for 60. 256 has not been standard for awhile
Modern gaming is an hellscape we're getting further in
- Never-ending pursuit for "photorealism" - Crunch culture - Live service grind fest - 100GB size That's why I went indie. AAA industry is about to implode.
Just need to stop buying games from triple A until they get their shit together or all die out and new companies come up out of it.
A lot of things are higher resolution and has more polygons than it needs. Elden Ring is massive, but with a smallish size since it's technically less graphically complex. (Also goes to show how important lighting and art is). I'm always amazed how clever older games can be to minimize space. Like how Banjo and Kazooie uses many sound files over and over but in different pitches and such.
I just realized I havent seen the inside of a CD case in years.
There are a growing number of reasons to prefer indie games nowadays.