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Why did the filesize of nearly every game became so big.

LectureMaster

Gold Member
From is the king in this regard , Sekiro is only 16GB while breathtakingly beautiful for graphics and music. Dark Souls 3 is also pretty small. Bloodborne is exception.
 

Drew1440

Member
I remember seeing that Microsoft used to put easter eggs in their applications like a flight simulator in Excel 95, purely to increate the file size of the application with the belief that the consumer sees a larger application as being more important/better value.

In reality most games are pushed out in a barley working state, with optimisation being given the least priority. Also in the case of the PS4/One, FLAC audio was used to reduce the overhead of the CPU which would have bloated up the game size compared to the compressed audio that was used in the prior generation (WMA for 360, ATRAC3 for PS3)
 

GloveSlap

Member
It is getting pretty crazy. Especially in the age of smaller SSDs.

I just downloaded Halo MCC on PC a couple of days ago.......182 GBs! I know its multiple games, but that still blew my hair back.

COD Warzone is crazy too, and it really has no excuse.
 
Games with huge environments, numerous assets and high-res characters will be larger in size. That’s it really.

Question for people who download games (whether on pc or consoles): how long does it take for you to download a 50+ Gb game? What’s a good internet speed for this?
 

Hydroxy

Member
I remember people freaking out over the download size of Max Payne 3 in 2010 for PC. It was about 27GB I think.
 

phil_t98

#SonyToo
Texture get more complex, they get bigger file sizes with 4k/8k res textures. We can’t expect more details in games and bigger more expansive worlds and smaller file sizes. Yes compression is good but not amazing
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
They were always big but devs had to optimize them. They’ve simply cut out that last step.
100% true.

The second gamers got Xbox One and PS4 with 500gb to 1tb drives, the file sizes ran gigantic, and patches too. What was that Dead Rising day one patch? Like 5 gb? Thats bigger than many entire 360 games that came on a DVD.

Devs sure seemed know how to do patches on my 20 gb 360 Pro system and they were probably 10 or 50 mb tops.

But then it became a gamer issue to handle it. And get an external drive to keep everything.
 

Xyphie

Member
Game devs definitely need to make game installs more modular. Localizations into different languages should only be installed on request, Allow MP/SP-only installs, delete single player cutscenes after they are played or stream them entirely etc.
 
Games with huge environments, numerous assets and high-res characters will be larger in size. That’s it really.

Question for people who download games (whether on pc or consoles): how long does it take for you to download a 50+ Gb game? What’s a good internet speed for this?
My own personal internet speed was irrelevant. It's about Sony servers. I game on PC now but I remember how the PlayStation Network was utterly terrible.
Steam is so much better in that regard.
 

leizzra

Member
In my experience assets are much more heavy now. Higher fidelity means not only higher texture resolution (which translates to bigger file size) but also more textures general. On one character we can have few texture sets, each have few textures. Then you have more characters so it stacks. And let's not forget about environment. Still we need to cut to fit everything (like lower mip-map and so on). And that's not even considering rest of stuff and duplicating data for better streaming. I'm looking at files for one mob - it's like 900MB and it's not even high quality model (like main character). Of course it's not from build (but already compressed by engine).
 

Killer8

Member
Why do people who want bigger and better looking games always freak out when the sizes go up too?

"I want photo-realistic visuals! Noooo, why are the textures now 4x the size!?"

I don't know if it's like an entitlement thing or just plain retardation.
 
Game devs definitely need to make game installs more modular. Localizations into different languages should only be installed on request, Allow MP/SP-only installs, delete single player cutscenes after they are played or stream them entirely etc.
How many games even have cutscenes done outside the game-engine these days ?

Anyways, it is mostly graphical / audio assets. I mean, do you really think that there is 100 gigs of executable code in those games?
 
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Skifi28

Member
I just downloaded Halo MCC on PC a couple of days ago.......182 GBs! I know its multiple games, but that still blew my hair back.
Wait, really? I remember it being 50-60 a few months ago and was thinking of downloading again. Ain't nobody got space for that.
 
dWsqp95.jpg
 

RaySoft

Member
For fuck sake why you guys always go with this stupid argument. Why the fuck someone “lazy” would become game developer!?
It stems from the age where programmers needed to come up with (often new) smart ways to overcome technical limitations of the target hardware, every saved byte counted.
Most programmers that come out of school today really don't have a low level knowledge of the hardware to even start to come up with smart tricks of the past.
You can't blame them though since the hardware has become way more complex than it was back in the day. So the "lazy" term doesn't mean they're litteraly a lazy person.
 
This is a lot of better quality assets, more assets... repeated assets, higher level languages, etc.

PS5 with its compression hardware reversed the trend (temporarily).
 

TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
Like everyone has said, audio and 4k textures.
Although with something like Call of Duty I'm not actually sure what's going on there.
It explains the over 50gb games but when it reaches over 150gb....yeah that don't make sense.
 

Rival

Gold Member
If anything I would think it has nothing to do with laziness and a lot to do with available time to optimize.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Ya, some of it can be explained with higher quality assets, audio etc....

But how can anyone explain this aside from not caring about compression or optimizing DR3 at launch on Xbox One? If that patch came out for a 360 game, it would had taken up almost my entire Xbox 360 20 gb HDD.


There's a new piece of downloadable content coming to Dead Rising 3 on the Xbox One, and along with it comes a new title update for the game — one that weighs in at a hefty 13GB. The update will be required if you want to play the game online or check out any of the upcoming DLC like this week's "Operation Broken Eagle" add-on. It includes a number of gameplay tweaks and stability and performance fixes.

"With all of the fixes and everything, it's a large update of about 13 gigs," says executive producer Josh Bridge, "but we really recommend getting it to ensure compatibility with the online players and all of the upcoming add-on content that's coming out shortly as well." The update is available today, so you can start downloading right away to be ready for the launch of the new DLC tomorrow — provided the huge file size doesn't interfere with your data cap.
 
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odd_hatch

Member
The real question is why is this even a concern with high speed internet and terabyte harddrives.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
The real question is why is this even a concern with high speed internet and terabyte harddrives.
Because redownloading games or transferring files back and forth from an HDD takes a while.

COD is anywhere from 100 - 250 gb depending which modes you install and FH4 is I think 150 gb. There's lots of games at 100+ on next gen.
 

Melter

Member
as someone who has worked on games, I'd rather not have to do assembly code and bit manipulation trickery to get a pixel to render a specific color just to keep file sizes down. Storage got real cheap, and the commoditization of engines means general purpose game development, which loses out on some efficiencies. Plus as you mentioned the modern demands of quality. Some assets are poorly optimized/packaged in bundles, but it is what it is. Again, storage is cheap so it's not that big of a deal.

With SSDs being standard we should see better utilization of assets/compression. Sony's done great work standardizing kraken compression tech to bring down file sizes, so there still modern methods to improve in this area.

As someone who has also worked on games (developer), I agree with you to a point. Super low level complicated trickery is definitely a product of it's time and something that no dev should really waste their time on nowadays. Having said that a lot of games I see with exhorbanant file sizes makes me wonder just how lazy some of these devs are these days. Modern Warfare is one such game that immediately comes to mind. I suspect that they are either using uncompressed audio and textures, or duplicating assets for the sake of performance, which just seems like a poor excuse for a workaround to me.

Another more recent example is the Castlevania Advance collection. This game is basically the Game Boy Advance ROMS plus some artwork and extra content packed in, and the game is over 750MB on Switch. For reference, all of the game boy advance ROMS are less than 50MB total, and I cannot see how even the uncompressed artwork and extra assets included are taking up anywhere near 700MB.

I am frustrated at how devs are taking advantage of storage space just because it is cheap. People want to store more than just a few games on their SSD, and on PC the SSD is also shared with whatever other space the OS and software takes up. So in my opinion just because storage has become relatively cheap it is NOT an excuse to go blowing through storage space out of sheer laziness.
 
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This is a lot of better quality assets, more assets... repeated assets, higher level languages, etc.

PS5 with its compression hardware reversed the trend (temporarily).
I’m not up to date with the PS5’s capabilities. How does it allow smaller filesizes?
The real question is why is this even a concern with high speed internet and terabyte harddrives.
While storage can be solved with externals hard drives, I have slow internet speed so I can’t download big games. I’m sure it’s the same for many other peopel.
 
Thats much more believable than being "lazy", There are other jobs you do less work and get more payed than being game developer, if someone is that lazy.
I don’t think lazy people select their career this way. They just go to where they can get some cash without being bothered too much… and you can do this as a game dev. In the end you just postpone the delivery and people will be annoyed but will wait anyway.
 

Derktron

Banned
For fuck sake why you guys always go with this stupid argument. Why the fuck someone “lazy” would become game developer!?
Because it’s true, look at games like Call of Duty where it takes 200 GB and more with each update and compare that with an open world game where it takes up less then 90GB. You sound salty and ignorant but I’m not surprised.
Season 4 Whatever GIF by The Office
 

Melter

Member
Except it actually is not cheap. One game can take quarter of $200 SSD. It is madness and it need to stop.
By cheap I mean storage in general. You can get a 8TB mechanical drive for around $200 USD as well. But I agree that it does need to stop.
 
While storage can be solved with externals hard drives, I have slow internet speed so I can’t download big games. I’m sure it’s the same for many other peopel.
Be patient :-/ or get the discs, unfortunately there is no magic to how games are made.
I’m not up to date with the PS5’s capabilities. How does it allow smaller filesizes?
It has to do with its hardware compression (actual hardware), its both VERY fast and efficient, so games are smaller and they load faster... They are still very big for a slow internet connection.

I borrowed the list from some gaming web site:

PS5 VS Xbox Series X, game sizes​

  • Control: 25.7 vs 43.6
  • Hitman 3: 61.9 vs 77.8
  • Subnautica: 3.8 vs 8.3
  • Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time: 20.0 vs 28.0
  • Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 e 2: 23.3 vs 31.9
  • Marvel’s Avengers: 74.1 vs 116.6
  • Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: 41.8 vs 72.5
  • Watch Dogs Legion: 50.6 vs 61.1
  • Immortals Fenyx Rising: 22.3 vs 32.9
  • Borderlands 3: 51.1 vs 63.8
  • DIRT 5: 50.9 vs 63.3
  • Mortal Shell: 4.6 vs 8.6
Then ran some numbers myself:

Total size:
PS5:
430.1 GB
Xbox Series X/S: 608.4 GB

Free space on new console:
PS5:
667 GB
Series X: 802 GB
Series S: 364 GB

Game sizes to storage ratio:
PS5:
64.5 %
Series X: 75.8 %
Series S: 167 %

Last gen consoles had similar game sizes to the Series consoles.
 

GloveSlap

Member
Wait, really? I remember it being 50-60 a few months ago and was thinking of downloading again. Ain't nobody got space for that.
Yeah i don't know, I remembered it being way smaller on xbox as well. I think they revamped the whole game. It runs extremely well now at least.
 

Banjo64

cumsessed
I’m just glad Halo MP and Battlefield 2042 are both estimated to be 60gb download on the Xbox store. That’s still reasonable IMO. Forza Horizon 5 at 100gb 🤮
 

Banjo64

cumsessed
Wait, really? I remember it being 50-60 a few months ago and was thinking of downloading again. Ain't nobody got space for that.
Just a heads up for anyone on Xbox, there is a content manager within the game so you can choose which campaigns/multiplayers you want installed. I just have the MPs on my Xbox and it comes to 80gb-ish.
 

Croatoan

They/Them A-10 Warthog
4k textures and hires models take up a lot of space. All those objects that make worlds seem detailed come at a hefty price as well.
 
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Rayderism

Member
I don't even want to hear anything about devs NOT wasting space. Pac-Man on PS4 is 838MB....even factoring the emulator to run it, it should never take that much space to run a 16kb rom. How is that not just plain bloat?

For contrast, Arcade Archives Sunsetriders (a much more complex game) is only like 88MB on PS4. While that still seems a bit high, it's still much more realistic than the extremely bloated file size for a simple Pac-Man game.
 

Evil Calvin

Afraid of Boobs
Nearly half of my Switch games are under 1gb storage (digital games) and this is on a 1Tb card. A lot are small indies but a lot are real full-fledged games. I think it's just crappy optimization and 4K assets for the console games.
 

Melter

Member
Nearly half of my Switch games are under 1gb storage (digital games) and this is on a 1Tb card. A lot are small indies but a lot are real full-fledged games. I think it's just crappy optimization and 4K assets for the console games.

Switch has lots of decent sized games but there are outliers. The Final Fantasy X / X2 collection is something like 30GB, presumably because Square Enix likes shoving every possible language into one package for their switch games instead of providing it as optional DLC (like Diablo 3 does)
 

22•22

NO PAIN TRANCE CONTINUE
Castlevania GBA collection was like 760 mb <3 and Chernobylite 30gb <3

Whenever I feel like playing (installing) CoDMW I'm like yeah... 100÷Gb nah..
 

Drew1440

Member
Another more recent example is the Castlevania Advance collection. This game is basically the Game Boy Advance ROMS plus some artwork and extra content packed in, and the game is over 750MB on Switch. For reference, all of the game boy advance ROMS are less than 50MB total, and I cannot see how even the uncompressed artwork and extra assets included are taking up anywhere near 700MB.
That might be due to the encryption being used, where extra data is for padding the file size in order for the decryption to work. I remember Gamecube and Wii games doing something similar.
 

CuNi

Member
I never got why people think that "lazy dev" means they want "quick buck for low effort".

"Lazy dev" means they cut out steps of game dev because they can.
Games like CoD Warzone etc. are made by lazy devs in a way where they just optimize the game enough so that it runs but let's be honest. Look at what the guys of Factorio did and now please try to somehow justify bugs being in Warzone for ages, no Anti-Cheat and the poorest game optimization I have seen only to be rivaled by Fan Made Unreal Engine games.

Back then, you had to optimize your game because consoles were very limited, but in todays time, you can make a game that looks like it came out of the 2000 to 2005s and yet utilizes your CPU and GPU 100% because it just draws the complete world even when you look at the sky or ground. This is todays definition of "lazy dev".
 

Evil Calvin

Afraid of Boobs
Castlevania GBA collection was like 760 mb <3 and Chernobylite 30gb <3

Whenever I feel like playing (installing) CoDMW I'm like yeah... 100÷Gb nah..
Same goes for Microsoft Flight Sim (I get why bit it's still over 110 GB), Avengers is about 115Gb, Assassin's Creed Valhalla is about 105GB. That is crazy. Those 3 games are almost half of the entire internal HD. The only one I have installed now is Vahalla......but I've been playing more Odyssey lately....and that is only 66GB and looks and plays great.
 

Hnjohngalt

Member
Be happy we are not charged for the extra space per game purchase. Imagine that sh#$storm ! $1 surcharge per gig.. it could be worse.
 
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