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

odd_hatch

Member
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.
I never have to transfer or re-download so I was not thinking about those problems.

But I would rather have games optimized for performance rather than trying to make it tiny.
 
I always find it funny that despite the insane file size of video games, you still have alot of low texture objects in almost every game.

What's funny about that? System memory is limited. You can't add highres textures everywhere with out running out of vram.
 
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Astral Dog

Member
It's actually all relative. Those small file sizes for early games weren't actually small back then. Many of those "small" games pushed the storage and processing capabilities of the machines they ran on.
Yep, Super Metroid was considered a big game with its 3MB cartridge back then.

I think the main difference is that all games ran from the disc/cart instead of these hard drives, and of course internet speed and cost they take longer to download, now with SSD storage costs should rise a little.

Also sometimes im surprised at the difference, some small ish games in scope are close to 50GB or even 100 😳
 
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Ev1L AuRoN

Member
Most games are still using the low-end Jaguar as baseline for their engines, since this CPU is very weak, most assets are stored uncompressed to make it easier on the CPU to stream game data.
 

Aion002

Member
I have seen the game for more than 6 years and it is the same, only more "HD", there is no evolution of the gameplay and the movement sequences are almost identical to those of a 7 or 8 year old game, of course they copy the same action sequences.

And yes, it is not possible that now you have to buy a higher capacity SSD, because your game consumes almost half of the PS5's SSD ...

Incredible and it is verifiable.

Here you will excuse me, but in this case, the Call of Duty developer are extremely lazy.
I think you're mistaken to call the devs lazy.

It's not up to them to decide what they should prioritize, by the end of the day the executives decides on what they should focus on and the devs are just trying their best to fulfill their tasks.


Activision is the one that should be called lazy and scummy... They probably decides to make the games as big as possible so the consumers cannot install more games on the console and prioritize Activision tired, overpriced, unbalanced, microtransactions ridden, disposable and lazy turd until the next year, when Activision releases their next same shit with a different skin game.
 
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Kamina

Golden Boy
For fuck sake why you guys always go with this stupid argument. Why the fuck someone “lazy” would become game developer!?
Being a lazy person or doing something lazy are not the same thing, so don’t freak out.
Looking at EA with their massive game sizes it is almost certainly a convenient situation for them to not have to optimize their files as much as back in the day.
 
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Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
Being a lazy person or doing something lazy are not the same thing, so don’t freak out.
Looking at EA with their massive game sizes it is almost certainly a convenient situation for them to not have to compress their files as much as back in the day.
These thing always comes down to either time constrain, lack of resources or even greed to make more profit, to me the argument of being “lazy” doesn’t make sense no matter the context.
 
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Very few developers are lazy, the sooner you get that toxic kind of thinking out of your head... the better, trust me.

When corners get cut, it's cause it was a time factor. They only have so much budget to do things, they have to prioritize. You can call it "being lazy" but really that just tells me that you lack experience in that kind of work environment.

OT: As for game sizes, more information equals more bytes, bits, bips, and boops... which equals to larger sizes. You only have so much time to dedicate to finding clever ways of cutting detail, without cutting detail. These developers have found amazingly ingenious ways of cutting down on size. Now it's up to compression to get better and we're finally seeing that, slowly tho. Data compression is not easy.

Everything has gotten larger. Movie files, song files, Word doc files, Photoshop files, illustrator files... data/information.
 
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Yoboman

Member
Are devs going to sell more if they made a lower file size?

No of course not, so why would they put effort into that
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
Wider variety of assets at higher resolutions.

Not really rocket science. Worlds have gotten both bigger and denser. Look back at older games that might be nice looking, but the expectation isn't as high for having unique details fairly dense. All of those things add up.
 
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I hear a lot of people mentioning Call of Duty as an example for big file sizes for no reason.

But I nominate Hasan over call of duty for that title. A 5 GB patch for a 5 second video clip…
 

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
Because fuck you and your limited storage space, that's why. Optimization? Why don't you optimize another $100+ hard drive.
 

Neilg

Member
Wider variety of assets at higher resolutions.

Not really rocket science. Worlds have gotten both bigger and denser. Look back at older games that might be nice looking, but the expectation isn't as high for having unique details fairly dense. All of those things add up.

Not only that, but duplicate assets for streaming from an HDD too. if every single call of duty map used the same texture or object in it, there would be a duplicate copy of that mesh or texture for every single map in the game. each level/map quadrant is entirely self contained as to not rely on assets or data files from any other level. This makes sure all the data is close together on the drive and you don't get people having worse pop in than others because they had more stuff installed on the drive in their ps4.

it's going to take a long time to get around this though because it's also a pretty efficient way to work in small teams at a huge studio.
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
What I’m more amazed by is Devs that accidentally (or intentionally?) leave cut content in the game data. So many games have cut VO, files, sounds, even entire sections of the game (Kotor2) just left in the game data. If you are cutting all that content why would you not delete the files and reduce the game size???
 

melekind

Neophyte
Not long ago, I bought a Mafia game, which was about 100 MB, and it took less than 10 seconds to download. But after playing for a period of time, I felt that the bigger and more elegant games made me more interested in playing
 

leizzra

Member
What I’m more amazed by is Devs that accidentally (or intentionally?) leave cut content in the game data. So many games have cut VO, files, sounds, even entire sections of the game (Kotor2) just left in the game data. If you are cutting all that content why would you not delete the files and reduce the game size???

We are doing lots of things during development. Testing stuff, making things that are removed from final game (for many reasons). Those things sometimes stays because someone is messy or just forgot about them. But there are times when you are not sure if removing them don't break something (because they may be used somewere) and you don't have much time to test it. Sometimes you may think that you'll use it in the future.

In the end I don't think that leftovers are big problem when you look at entire game size.
 
Are devs going to sell more if they made a lower file size?

No of course not, so why would they put effort into that
I recall that in the 360 era if you wanted to ship games on more than one DVD Microsoft charged more money.

Now the sky is the limit.
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Because filesize is another of those factors contributing to the building of that precious e-peen, and those PCMR guys and console gamers with more money than sense are more than happy to flaunt their expensive extra hard drives and devs know it. A few years ago Adam Orth was crucified for making fun of people with slow/unreliable internet, now if you don’t have a connection that’ll download 100GBs by the time you’ve taken a shit why are you even playing games, lol! It’s called being dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

(only half sarcastic here. My connection manages about 4-5 GBs per hour, you bet I automatically ignore games that’ll take 20+ hours to download. The biggest games usually aren’t even the best ones. Devs may not be lazy, there’s a ton of reasons why filesize can’t be optimized especially in time for launch, but there’s still many great and good-looking games that don’t need that many GBs.)
 
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