My mind is blown by how much hard drive space games require

[Dankk]

I installed Black Ops 3 the other day, and noticed the final install size was ~55GB. Pretty huge, but it also reminded me that there are more and more games coming out these days that seem to be this huge.

So I became curious. I used a free utility called SpaceSniffer to graph out the folders on my hard drive, and see which of my PC games were consuming the most space. These my top 5 biggest game installs right now.

Battlefield 4 (with DLC): 57GB
The Evil Within (with DLC): 58GB
Grand Theft Auto V: 62GB
Titanfall (with DLC): 62GB

And the biggest of all -

Call of Duty Advanced Warfare (with DLC): 77GB

The fact that Advanced Warfare is so huge came as a surprise to me. I knew I had a couple of games that edged into the ~60GB territory, but I was not aware I had any games that are almost a whopping 80GB.

I'm certain this is due to the new generation of consoles. When game devs are creating multi-platform games, they have to accommodate the lowest common denominator (the weakest console). Last generation, it was the Xbox 360, whose dual-layered DVDs could only hold 8GB of content, so developers pretty much designed around that.

Now that the latest Xbox and Playstation consoles both support 50GB Blurays, game developers are pretty much going crazy with all the space available to them, and the craziness affects PC gamers too.

And as a preemptive counter to those who will inevitably complain about this: no, it's not "poor optimization" or "laziness" as some angsty forum users would claim. Rather, it's just the fact that it's the year 2015, video games are as detailed and technologically advanced as ever, and that comes at a cost. Fortunately for us PC gamers, hard drive space is pretty cheap.

Anyway, it's late at night and I'm not sure where I'm going with this... just thought it would be fun to share and talk about how crazy gaming has become. 10 years ago I could not have imagined installing a 77GB video game.

 

[TheELF]

Yup,70Gb in graphics/textures/audio and 7 Gb in gameplay,if even that much.
Well what can you do,1080/FullHD needs big clean textures to make it look good, no way around that.

 

[XiandreX]

I remember when games were around 100-300 mb and we were amazed how much space they took.
My issues is this. I run games only off my SSD and its becoming an issue.
In South Africa our internet is very slow (compare to the rest of the world)
Downloading 50Gig's for a single game is a very lengthy process.
I most certainly do not want to delete a game to make room for another as re-downloading takes too long.
I am looking forward to the point where I can buy a 2-3tb SSD for an affordable amount.

 

[BSim500]

And as a preemptive counter to those who will inevitably complain about this: no, it's not "poor optimization" or "laziness" as some angsty forum users would claim.

Actually some of it is precisely that. Eg, didn't Titanfall come with 35GB of uncompressed WAV audio files? That's a massive waste of space that could easily be 30GB smaller without quality loss. The excuse was "to dedicate more resources to the game" is lame as MP3 decompression barely uses up 2% of a single core and dual-core i3's seem to have no problems with other FPS games on the audio side of things. Good Lord, I have +10-15 year old games with compressed MP3/OGG sound / music which even single-core CPU's of the day could manage. From what I understand the real problem was weak console CPU's that were already dipping below 25fps slowed down even more, in which case that is indeed both poor optimization / consolization and laziness for the PC port...

 

[TheELF]

Downloading 50Gig's for a single game is a very lengthy process.
I most certainly do not want to delete a game to make room for another as re-downloading takes too long.

You can copy the game folder to an other drive,most games will keep running just fine or you can copy them back to ssd whenever you want.

 

[balloonshark]

Game size is insane and I only have a 250GB bandwidth cap at my 50Mbps speed tier. Download one big game a month and sprinkle in netflix and surfing and you're close to hitting the cap.

 

[DigDog]

titanfall was 50Gb, out of which 40+ were audio files. it's just crap they shovel in there without bothering about optimization.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

Hm. Instead of thinking about hard drive space, what about bandwidth? If games get big enough, could it drive ISPs back into monthly caps? Or do we have monthly caps now in many cases already?

 

[shortylickens]

I took a chance on Elder Scrolls Online. Its a tad over 80 gigs.

 

[Gryz]

80GB is nothing.
Ten years from now we'll see games that are a full TeraByte in size.


I remember one of my first jobs in 1990. We had Internet-access. (Only 10-15 sites in my county had Internet-access). X11R4 was released. X11 is the windowing system on Unix systems. The compressed source-code was 60 MB big. Just 60 MB. Everybody was going to download it. This was considered a big event, with a huge amount of data. Mirrors were set up on all continents before X11R4 was released. Because lines across the ocean were generally 128-256Kbps. All faculties of my university combined used a 2 Mbps line to our ISP.

Then the next year we got 2GB disks for our servers. Dozens of students working simultaneously on such a server. 2GB disks were considered huge ! Our older servers had 600MB disks.

 

[master_shake_]

hopefully the price of 1tb ssds comes down.

i use a four 15000rpm drive raid 0 for my games drive.

 

[TheSlamma]

hopefully the price of 1tb ssds comes down.

i use a four 15000rpm drive raid 0 for my games drive.

AID 0, nothing redundant about it

Livin on the edge

 

[master_shake_]

AID 0, nothing redundant about it

Livin on the edge

you should see the 66 Tb's that backs it up



well 56 after redundancy...

 

[cyclohexane]

Why not just store games on hdds? No real difference in performance beside longer load times.

 

[Gryz]

Why not just store games on hdds? No real difference in performance beside longer load times.

Because longer load times.
It's noticeable in quite a few games.

I have a 256GB SSD. I usually have around 10 games on it (and Windows and the Users folder). After I finish my games, I move them to my HDD. And put a symlink (junction in windows-speak) from my E: \Games folder where they used to be, to the new location on my HDD. But it gets a bit tiresome. As SSDs become cheaper and cheaper, I will probably buy a 500GB SSD one of these days.

 

[Sabrewings]

Why not just store games on hdds? No real difference in performance beside longer load times.

Depends on the game. For KSP, which loads all assets into memory on launch, it's the difference between 2 minutes or 20 seconds every time the game starts.

I have a 480GB PCIe SSD that I keep all my games on (OS, as well). Works for me and I only use about half of it at any given moment. This game size issue is one reason I like how some developers are getting more creative. For Star Citizen, for example, they're not using 4k textures for the ships like a lot people suspected. Instead, they're doing multi-layered tiling and drastically cutting down on the vRAM and storage space required. They do it out of necessity, but it's nice to see innovation either way.

 

[Squeetard]

I thought they did the uncompressed audio thing to deter piracy?

 

[wanderer27]

Hm. Instead of thinking about hard drive space, what about bandwidth? If games get big enough, could it drive ISPs back into monthly caps? Or do we have monthly caps now in many cases already?

Yeah, the storm is coming :

http://www.cinemablend.com/televisi...Netflix-Too-Much-Get-Charged-Extra-97617.html


.

 

[Sabrewings]

Yeah, the storm is coming :

http://www.cinemablend.com/televisi...Netflix-Too-Much-Get-Charged-Extra-97617.html


.

I've already drafted a letter that tells Verizon how many times, and in how many different ways, they can have coitus with themselves if they even think about doing that to my Fios. I will pay whatever cancellation fee they want, but they can piss off. I finally caved and accepted it on mobile, but they can go to hell for capping my home connection.

 

[moonbogg]

I don't have a lot of games, but even for me this is becoming an issue. I have two SSD's that are 256gb each, and they are both nearly full with only a few games each. Its getting quite ridiculous.
My tinfoil hat insight tells me that game studios and SSD tech companies are owned by the same people. Come up with a BS reason to stop compressing files and watch our SSD sales go through the roof.

 

[Artorias]

80GB is nothing.
Ten years from now we'll see games that are a full TeraByte in size.


I remember one of my first jobs in 1990. We had Internet-access. (Only 10-15 sites in my county had Internet-access). X11R4 was released. X11 is the windowing system on Unix systems. The compressed source-code was 60 MB big. Just 60 MB. Everybody was going to download it. This was considered a big event, with a huge amount of data. Mirrors were set up on all continents before X11R4 was released. Because lines across the ocean were generally 128-256Kbps. All faculties of my university combined used a 2 Mbps line to our ISP.

Then the next year we got 2GB disks for our servers. Dozens of students working simultaneously on such a server. 2GB disks were considered huge ! Our older servers had 600MB disks.

I'm not so sure that internet bandwidth will keep up though, right now at least in the western world these corps are trying to suck as much money out of you for as little service as possible.

 

[wanderer27]

I've already drafted a letter that tells Verizon how many times, and in how many different ways, they can have coitus with themselves if they even think about doing that to my Fios. I will pay whatever cancellation fee they want, but they can piss off. I finally caved and accepted it on mobile, but they can go to hell for capping my home connection.

50-80GB per game (and growing)
Patch updates for each game you have installed (Steam)
Online Gaming (MMO/MMORPG)
Win 10 updates whether you want/need them or not
Skype
Pandora
Facebook
Basic Web browsing
Youtube
Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc.

It's not that difficult to bust the Cap.
I only do the last three of that (incomplete) list and I've busted it several times since cutting the Cord . . . and I don't watch much TV at all.


300GB sounds like a lot, but people are going to be surprised at how quickly it gets eaten up.

Just wait until 4K HD video gets more common.


.

 

[Insomniator]

SSD's have come way down. 1 TB drives are down to 300 bucks.

If you have to have 10 games installed at once for some reason, just move ones that don't benefit from SSD's to a HDD.

 

[Gryz]

I'm not so sure that internet bandwidth will keep up though, right now at least in the western world these corps are trying to suck as much money out of you for as little service as possible.

True, you got a point there. Technology might not be improving as fast as we wish. But 10 years is a long time.

In 10 years time, many people will have 1 Gbps fiber to their homes. With 1 Gbps, it will take only ~2.5 hours to download 1 TeraByte.

The problem will be the backbones of ISPs. It looks like the speed of their links will be limited to 100 Gbps for quite a while. I don't know of any technologies yet that can do more than 100 Gbps over 1 wavelength. I guess the future looks bright for manufacturers of DWDM equipment.

BTW, I know that in the US your providers are trying to slow down growth with all means possible. Using the legal system, lobbying, marketing, using their monopolies, and I bet they make hidden or implicit pricing deals too. But in the rest of the world, the free world, technology will keep progressing. I'm sorry you get to live in the backwaters, technology-wise.

 

[escrow4]

Meanwhile outside of the US that is a pipe dream. Over here in Australia I can pull down 1.6MB/s. Period. Give or take 10%. And now stupid game devs are only putting part of the games on DVDs and you still have to download fat pieces. I finished the Witcher III a few months back (bought on DVD). Now with all the patches and Hearts of Stone its 20GB to update. I gave up. FO4 alone is just a ~24GB download (for now). And most of that space is redundant crap. What high res textures? And doesn't audio compress well? I prefer things hard copy and offline and yet everything seems to be reversing away from that. And why? The center of the world isn't the US.