Game sizes are getting too big

[moonbogg]

I have 50mbps fiber for a good price (forgot what it is). No matter the game size, its always tolerable to wait for the game to download. It might take 30 minutes or I'll let it go overnight and forget about it or whatever. Its just not an issue, but what IS an issue is my L33T SSD getting filled with bloated crapware from farty game devz who laze about all day at work in their fluffy UGGS instead of compressing their games like they ought to be doing.

 

[TeknoBug]

Yup games are regularly hitting 30-50GB, it's a bad thing for us still on ISP bandwidth caps, with 5 days left on my cap I just exceeded my 250GB due to buying some heavy hitters during Black Friday, ugh. Right now I can't afford to pay extra for unlimited since I'm already paying an arm and leg for internet/TV services.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I would think it might be of some publisher perceived benefit as it would make it more difficult to facilitate piracy. I'm not gonna try to upload a 50GB game.

 

[mnewsham]

I would think it might be of some publisher perceived benefit as it would make it more difficult to facilitate piracy. I'm not gonna try to upload a 50GB game.

Meh, plenty of people have good upload speeds these days.

I pay $65/month for this in the US without a data cap.

50GB that's what, 45-60 minutes?

 

[skipsneeky2]

Meh, plenty of people have good upload speeds these days.

I pay $65/month for this in the US without a data cap.

50GB that's what, 45-60 minutes?

God this makes me cry,where i live there is a single dsl company that offers up to 12mbps/2mbps upload and it runs me $108.They have a monopoly here.

My biggest game GTA V took me nearly 18 hours to download. I buy and download few big games cause of this lol.

 

[mohit9206]

Man i am so fed up of these massive game sizes. Why can't these companies compress the file sizes like the pirates do? Living in a third world country and having extremely slow and expensive Internet, its almost impossible to play any AAA PC games unless you buy the physical copy.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Man i am so fed up of these massive game sizes. Why can't these companies compress the file sizes like the pirates do? Living in a third world country and having extremely slow and expensive Internet, its almost impossible to play any AAA PC games unless you buy the physical copy.

Then you better hope the physical copy actually has the game on the disk and not just a Steam downloader like some are starting to do.

 

[slag]

Then you better hope the physical copy actually has the game on the disk and not just a Steam downloader like some are starting to do.

Really doesn't matter as there will be a huge day 0 patch thats at least half the size of the game anyway.

 

[exdeath]

Hard drives are still a thing? How primitive. I guess VHS and cassette are still a thing in some countries too.

I'm going to be building a IBM PC 5150 from scratch, and by that I mean assembling the mother board myself : http://www.mtmscientific.com/pc-retro.html. Always wanted to go back and toy around with hardware and machine code in ways I didn't quite understand at 6 years old and also try my hand at custom graphics chip development on an FPGA in the ISA slot (targeting a 320 x 240 x 16 bit x 4 layers tile based VDP that will provide SNES+ graphics and eliminate the 4.77 MHz 8088 and 1.19 MB/s bus as a bottleneck much like consoles did with their hardware VDPs.)

And all that said, even THAT won't have a hard drive, it's going to be a XT-IDE Compact Flash adapter for the C: drive.

 

[Newbian]

Then you better hope the physical copy actually has the game on the disk and not just a Steam downloader like some are starting to do.

Unless you can somehow get a blue ray dvd pc game it's not going to happen unless they ship with multiple dvd's in one game box but these days it's too expensive now compared to simply having people download it.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Of course HDD space is increasing, sure 1Tb was a nice barrier to blow through some years ago, but technology marches on and now we have 10Tb HDDs, and there's no indication that progress in HDD technology is slowing down, providing there's a demand for drives, it will be filled.

Same goes for internet connectivity, I have 200Mbit FTTC with uncapped downloads, that's about 25MB/sec download speed at peak, for a modern 60Gb game that's about 40 minutes at full speed.

Times change, once you've been around technology for a long time (a decade or more) you simply get used to things changing on a large scale like this, many of us here will remember having HDDs that measured in Mb rather than Gb and RAM measured in Kb.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Software can do bloat faster than you can say Moore's Law. So be really careful what you wish for if you are complaining that you have too much unused capacity and bandwidth...

Oh BTW anybody distributing multi GB software without using loseless compression should be outright fired. All of them, because there is just no valid excuse, period.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I think game sizes are definitely a problem. I have crappy DSL internet, still pay 100.00 per month for it, and it took me many, many hours to download FO4.

For a large game, I would pay extra for the physical copy if it actually included the entire game, but a someone else said, even then you often have to download the game from Steam anyway.

 

[Golgatha]

Get a fast but small SSD and use Intel RST to cache your large spindle drives for games. Best of both worlds. I did this for quite a long time and just recently went pure SSDs for everything (because overkill).

 

[SMOGZINN]

Unless you can somehow get a blue ray dvd pc game it's not going to happen unless they ship with multiple dvd's in one game box but these days it's too expensive now compared to simply having people download it.

I think it is time we change over to NAND memory for software distribution. Instead of a CD we could have what amounts to a piece of cardboard with a series of NAND chips on it. Connect it with a micro USB cable and it installs the game.

 

[JujuFish]

Of course HDD space is increasing, sure 1Tb was a nice barrier to blow through some years ago, but technology marches on and now we have 10Tb HDDs, and there's no indication that progress in HDD technology is slowing down, providing there's a demand for drives, it will be filled.

Same goes for internet connectivity, I have 200Mbit FTTC with uncapped downloads, that's about 25MB/sec download speed at peak, for a modern 60Gb game that's about 40 minutes at full speed.

Times change, once you've been around technology for a long time (a decade or more) you simply get used to things changing on a large scale like this, many of us here will remember having HDDs that measured in Mb rather than Gb and RAM measured in Kb.

Not to be that guy, but a lower case 'b' stands for bit, though you seem to be using it as byte. Carry on.

 

[Fardringle]

I remember when we first added a 10MB (yes, M) hard drive to the family computer so it could store games instead of swapping out 360KB floppy disks to play games. There was no possible way anybody could ever fill up that massive amount of storage space...

 

[exdeath]

100 KB/s and 3 IOPs was fast when you only had < 10 MB of data total and your OS fit in 360 KB.

But here we are in 2016 still doing 100 KB/s and 3 IOPs on mechanical devices with 6+ TB on them. WTF.

 

[mnewsham]

100 KB/s and 3 IOPs on mechanical devices with 6+ TB on them. WTF.

My biggest drive is 4TB and it offers 120MB/s write speeds, IOPS around 80-130.

Sure it's no SSD, but it isn't terrible.

 

[exdeath]

My biggest drive is 4TB and it offers 120MB/s write speeds, IOPS around 80-130.

Sure it's no SSD, but it isn't terrible.

Plot size growth on top of performance growth since 1982 and you won't even see the performance growth plot. It's terrible.

 

[moonbogg]

My biggest drive is 4TB and it offers 120MB/s write speeds, IOPS around 80-130.

Sure it's no SSD, but it isn't terrible.

Is that 80-130k? It can't be 80-130.

 

[mnewsham]

Is that 80-130k? It can't be 80-130.

It's not an SSD, HDDs struggle to break 200 IOPS for random read/writes


Here is a review of the WD black 6TB for reference of a decent high capacity HDD.

http://www.storagereview.com/wd_black_6tb_hdd_review

 

[nerp]

To get around data caps, just carry your rig to a starbucks. Use a cheap WIFI USB stick. Hang out all day and download the heck out of that.

 

[Newbian]

To get around data caps, just carry your rig to a starbucks. Use a cheap WIFI USB stick. Hang out all day and download the heck out of that.

Let me just dissemble my desktop and rebuild it there.

I am sure everything will be fine.

 

[futurefields]

Hard drives are still a thing? How primitive. I guess VHS and cassette are still a thing in some countries too.

I'm going to be building a IBM PC 5150 from scratch, and by that I mean assembling the mother board myself : http://www.mtmscientific.com/pc-retro.html. Always wanted to go back and toy around with hardware and machine code in ways I didn't quite understand at 6 years old and also try my hand at custom graphics chip development on an FPGA in the ISA slot (targeting a 320 x 240 x 16 bit x 4 layers tile based VDP that will provide SNES+ graphics and eliminate the 4.77 MHz 8088 and 1.19 MB/s bus as a bottleneck much like consoles did with their hardware VDPs.)

And all that said, even THAT won't have a hard drive, it's going to be a XT-IDE Compact Flash adapter for the C: drive.

What does this have to do with the thread? It has nothing to do with it. You are just showing off your technical knowledge and it's completely off topic.




I agree OP, game sizes are way too big.