Game sizes are getting too big

[moonbogg]

I used to have respect for the 1TB sized hard drive. It was the big daddy of hard drives. If you had that much space, you were going to have plenty if you were an average user or typical gamer. That's no longer the case.
Some games are 60+gigs now and they aren't getting any smaller. Pretty soon I expect to see the first 100GB game, and there might already be such a game with mods included and all that. So, before long, a 1TB hard drive will only hold around 10 games, and that's not leaving much room for anything else.
Its not like hard drive space is increasing at a similar rate to game sizes either, especially if you want an SSD, even though all hard drive tech has been getting much cheaper and better, the sudden explosion of space requirements for games is way too much for storage technology to keep up with, especially if the trend continues.
What the hell happened? How can games go from less than 10GB to 60+ in a couple years? Its not like visual fidelity has increased along with the requirements. We don't get a better game which would justify the massive and sudden increase in storage requirements. So what's going on with this nonsense?

 

[TridenT]

From what I gather, it's mostly because they're console ported and just laziness on developer side. Titanfall having 30+GB of wav files for instance.

 

[tential]

I would say keep the games installed on your SSD that you're playing, and get a 5TB HDD?

I have no idea why anyone would purchase a 1TB HDD... I purchased 1.5TB a LONG time ago. If you purchase a storage HDD, it should be at a minimum. I prefer to use the Seagate Backup Plus, tear them down, and use those for storage for something like this. Cheap at $80-120, but a TON of storage.

 

[KMFJD]

don't even get me started on the size of patches...

 

[TridenT]

don't even get me started on the size of patches...

2GB patches because why do a diff update when you can just redownload the entire file?

 

[Newbian]

This is why you can have multiple drives.

 

[RockinZ28]

Another thing I really dislike is they force you to dl a 10gb dlc "patch" that you can't even play unless you buy it.

I don't really care too much about the space consumed, but sooner or later Verizon wireless is going to cut me off with these 50gb downloads.

I would say keep the games installed on your SSD that you're playing, and get a 5TB HDD?

I have no idea why anyone would purchase a 1TB HDD... I purchased 1.5TB a LONG time ago. If you purchase a storage HDD, it should be at a minimum. I prefer to use the Seagate Backup Plus, tear them down, and use those for storage for something like this. Cheap at $80-120, but a TON of storage.

That's what I've been doing last couple years, moving from ssd to hdd. With Steam it's simple. Origin bit of a hassle, but doable. Uplay, just wtf.

But yea 1tb is small now. I bought two 2tb Samsung drives in 2010 for $65 each. Still using them + 500gb ssd. Do have a 12tb NAS as well for media though.

 

[bystander36]

30 years ago, a 20MB drive was a big daddy, and people were sold with the idea they'd never need all that space. Every few years, we find our selves needing more storage. It is a never ending cycle. Applications and games use more space, and HDD's get bigger. If you feel they are getting too big now, well, wait in 10 years and you'll laugh at that idea.

 

[mizzou]

Just wait till 4k...

 

[JujuFish]

I'm getting a sense of deja vu.

 

[Fenixgoon]

put your OS on an SSD then run 2x 3TB in stripe mode for $250 total. space is cheap.

 

[Sonikku]

What, don't you want uncompressed audio on your SSD?!

 

[JimmiG]

Hard drives are cheap, however if you want to store all your games on SSD's for maximum performance, the size becomes a problem. Ideally we'd have some kind of intelligent caching mechanism that would split up the gamne and put the streaming audio and video on the HDD and the actual level data on the SSD. You can kind of do that with symlinks, but it gets very messy, very quickly.

I'm all for variety and unique textures throughout the game levels, but there has got to be a way to compress the data more. There are 64 KB "scene demos" that look awesome

 

[flexy]

My mind is more blown realizing I once had a computer with 64KB of RAM and you could actually play games and load applications on it.

My mind is blown that once I needed many hours to download a 740kb disk image.

My mind is especially blown realizing that my first HD was 20MB, while ONE SINGLE DRIVER for a graphics card today can easily be 300MB.

So...how about getting into a time machine and tell this me in the past that I would need FIFTEEN of those massive HDs just to store ONE SINGLE DRIVER, not to mention I'd need many more hard drives when I would want to actually extract the downloaded 300MB file.

So from that P.o.V, 60GB game doesn't even sound too far out.

And yeah "one gigahertz CPU" also once sounded extremely ridiculous

** And yes, lazy coding, no optimizations etc...etc. Lazy coding is made good with increased h/w requirements...I mean why write fast and optimized code, say, in assembler or highly optimized C++ if you can just have poor, slow code (--> Windows)...and then just take 8GB of memory and the fastest quad core CPU you can get...even if THEORETICALLY this Windows OS or this game, if written highly optimized could run well on a machine 10x less powerful

 

[KMFJD]

2GB patches because why do a diff update when you can just redownload the entire file?

What? Are you saying that the 1gb patch to change bullet trajectory is over the top?

 

[XiandreX]

Hard drives are cheap, however if you want to store all your games on SSD's for maximum performance, the size becomes a problem. Ideally we'd have some kind of intelligent caching mechanism that would split up the gamne and put the streaming audio and video on the HDD and the actual level data on the SSD. You can kind of do that with symlinks, but it gets very messy, very quickly.

I'm all for variety and unique textures throughout the game levels, but there has got to be a way to compress the data more. There are 64 KB "scene demos" that look awesome

This is my issue. If we could buy 2-3TB SSD at reasonable pricing it would stink but not be so much of an issue.
However we are not there yet.

 

[Sabrewings]

I get by just fine with a 480GB SSD and 9TB of long term storage.

There is hope for the future. Maybe not smaller sizes, but more bang for our size buck. Tiled resources instead of large unique textures goes a long way on cutting down on large uncompressible data. Tiled resources is a major trick CIG uses on Star Citizen:

http://youtu.be/n3BTp2I1mJk

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Currently I have 512+250GB SSD storage and another 15 TB of HDD storage.

I would be happier if I had 2 TB SSD storage and 32 TB HDD storage.

 

[Anomaly1964]

I'm a PC gamer so I can say this, but man it is just EN VOGUE for PC gamers to bitch about EVERYTHING...

 

[sweenish]

Not just PC gamers, but most people who call themselves gamers.

I stopped calling myself a gamer, there is no way I'm associating myself with these whiny children.

 

[moonbogg]

Hard drives are cheap, however if you want to store all your games on SSD's for maximum performance, the size becomes a problem. Ideally we'd have some kind of intelligent caching mechanism that would split up the gamne and put the streaming audio and video on the HDD and the actual level data on the SSD. You can kind of do that with symlinks, but it gets very messy, very quickly.

I'm all for variety and unique textures throughout the game levels, but there has got to be a way to compress the data more. There are 64 KB "scene demos" that look awesome

That's the issue right there. I partially solved it by forking out some heavy cash for a 1TB SSD. So now I have 1TB + 250GB + 250GB SSD's, all of which will be used for making the lives of lazy game coders a little easier. LAZY uncompressed GARBAGE. I refuse to use slow and poopy HDD's for my games and other elite applications.

 

[TridenT]

What? Are you saying that the 1gb patch to change bullet trajectory is over the top?

No, it's usually like, "Shit, we forgot a semicolon in our code. Alright, I patched it. Send it out for release guys!" 2+GB patch from Steam or whatever comes down the pipe. Release Notes: "Minor bug fixes."

 

[moonbogg]

No, it's usually like, "Shit, we forgot a semicolon in our code. Alright, I patched it. Send it out for release guys!" 2+GB patch from Steam or whatever comes down the pipe. Release Notes: "Minor bug fixes."

What happens to the 2GB when you install the patch? Does it simply replace existing code, leaving your hard drive space about the same? Or does it use 2 additional gigs of space for some stupid reason?

 

[Zenoth]

Games are definitely bigger and bigger.

I pretty much have to get unlimited monthly download from my ISP (which I pay extra for), otherwise I bust my limit Every. Single. Month (tried it without unlimited, busted the limit for five consecutive months, got my message but I reacted slowly at the time, oh well). Just last month, Fallout 4's download alone was what... 25, 26GB? That's ONE single download in a month, when most ISP's monthly limit here in Canada averages at around 70GB, it's ridiculous (and ISPs know it very well, that's why their usual monthly limit is that low, to "convince" us going for unlimited). It's also why I don't bother with SSDs, there's no way in Hell I'll have the patience to constantly install and uninstall games based on what I feel like playing just because my storage capacity is about as good as a Nintendo 64 memory card (of course I'm exaggerating...). I want my Steam library mostly installed (that's 100+ games), that's excluding Origin and retail game installations (not to mention music and movie libraries).

 

[TridenT]

What happens to the 2GB when you install the patch? Does it simply replace existing code, leaving your hard drive space about the same? Or does it use 2 additional gigs of space for some stupid reason?

Who fucking knows. I don't even pay attention. From what I gather, it's usually just a replacement of previous file(s). Having obscenely large 5+gb files is the bees knees these days. May as well just have a 40GB .exe file.

Games are definitely bigger and bigger.

I pretty much have to get unlimited monthly download from my ISP (which I pay extra for), otherwise I bust my limit Every. Single. Month (tried it without unlimited, busted the limit for five consecutive months, got my message but I reacted slowly at the time, oh well). Just last month, Fallout 4's download alone was what... 25, 26GB? That's ONE single download in a month, when most ISP's monthly limit here in Canada averages at around 70GB, it's ridiculous (and ISPs know it very well, that's why their usual monthly limit is that low, to "convince" us going for unlimited). It's also why I don't bother with SSDs, there's no way in Hell I'll have the patience to constantly install and uninstall games based on what I feel like playing just because my storage capacity is about as good as a Nintendo 64 memory card (of course I'm exaggerating...). I want my Steam library mostly installed (that's 100+ games), that's excluding Origin and retail game installations (not to mention music and movie libraries).

Is it sad that I saw Fallout 4 as 25GB and thought, "Oh, it's not that big! Sweet." Of course, I ran the game and thought, "Where's the 25+GB going here? Looks like shit."