Why Modern Gaming is so big?

[HyperTurboFox]

I don't get it why most games have hundred of Gigabyte to install. Ugh! Long downloads and load time.
It's don't help that 2D games nowadays can even have like 20 GB?! OH MY GOD! These Devs desperately need to compress their game, oh this is too much bloat.

 

[fake-kun]

Because devs don't care/have time for optimization. Also, modern engines are bloated.

 

[Stookymalarkey]

Chasing more and more realistic graphics leads to more graphical assets that are larger in size.

 

[Elwiwi]

I remember when I spend 4 days downloading mhworld last year and I had the game in physical. Yes I have a shitty wi-fi

 

[pasin7ru]

i thought the title referred to the size of the industry and its market.
why are games taking up so much space? i have no idea. even graphically limited games, be it new 2D ones or 3D games inspired by an older generation with much lower graphical fidelity, require a lot of processing power now and they are larger in size compared to generations past. why is Boltgun so large when it looks like it is a DOOM wad?

 

[LiberoVulpes]

Poor compression standards.

What eats the most is uncompressed .wav files and Textures.

Compression = How big they are.
Optimization = How good they run.

 

[Varyag]

Bad optimization/compression not being valued at all by current developers, plus modern engines being absolutely massively bloated with, again, unoptimized 3D and audio assets. Unreal Engine is the greatest contributor to this, but other engines aren't immune to this either (I'm looking at the past 5 years of CoD games which were all 200+GB in size yearly)

 

[GardeniaSky]

I hate to sound like an old lady but older games having space constraints was so good for the industry.

Now everything is massive. I think genuinely good games being big seems okay to me compared to a bad game taking up space. I get upset when a bad game is sitting in my hard drive.

 

[destinyduelist]

Because most triple A devs haven't figured out compression yet

 

[Varyag]

I hate to sound like an old lady but older games having space constraints was so good for the industry.

Now everything is massive. I think genuinely good games being big seems okay to me compared to a bad game taking up space. I get upset when a bad game is sitting in my hard drive.

Limitation breeds creativity, or so they say. Absolutely agreed. I'm a sort of digital hoarder, I like having many many many games to choose from at any given moment. That's extremely easy with retro games on emulators. Not so much with modern games, unless you significantly prefer indie titles.
2-3 games at around the 200+GB mark, and there goes a whole storage drive just for them.

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

Poor compression standards.

What eats the most is uncompressed .wav files and Textures.

Even those usually are compressed when downloading. But no i see games the downloads are 70Gb+.

I helped a friend on the Unreal engine bit back in 2016. For a number of base textures, you could either have a generate-on-the-fly textures, or pregenerated. The on-the-fly was something like 1/8th the size of the pregenerated, but took a little longer on gameboot (we're talking milliseconds in time, but when you have several hundred of them...)

Texture resolution is likely one large culprit, i've not seen a reason to go above 1k textures, yet some textures are 4k or larger. On Skyrim i used a texture optimizer and repeatedly reduced the textures by half size until it got to about 2k and 1k in size and didn't notice a difference each time i booted the test game up until that point.

Another thing that takes a tonne of space is object placement. Skyrim the world is generated using seeds for locations of trees random base objects, textures, etc and then you use a delta for changed objects per section/sector; Without that Skyrim's base world would have taken many more gigabytes in size and probably wouldn't have been shipable as it was on disc. Morrowind on the other hand likely used bicubic for it's terrain where you have a 64x64 height map and you specify textures along with the differential, and objects like rocks are mostly placed to hide bad blending of textures.

Uncompressed audio is just stupid. I'd recommend going back to soundfonts and midi files, and only using pre-renedered audio when it just doesn't cut it. We're talking the difference of a few hundred k compared to dozens of megabytes, blending audio isn't that difficult and only voice samples and sounds that can't be sound-fonts should be actual audio files.

One of the largest files at all is premade videos usually for upgrade items or intros or other cutscenes instead of being in-engine. When you don't have the processing power (or the complexity is prohibitive) pre-rendered will work. But the bitrate i've seen in some games video files are absurdly high, like 50Mbit/s. and some video is 4k resolution. Yeah they look nice, but lowering that a bit and reducing to 1080 would save dozens of gigabytes easily for something you barely see.

 

[HyperTurboFox]

Because most triple A devs haven't figured out compression yet

It's very irony, that they forgot to compress their own assets (⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)

 

[Big Finger Jim]

They don't like optimizing sound files

 

[J.F.C]

Devs not knowing how to fucking compress an audio file in 2025, bloated textures and just plain laziness.

 

[Graw]

It's don't help that 2D games nowadays can even have like 20 GB?!

A lot of 2d games aren't really 2d. They use a 3d game engine and just position the camera so the game looks 2d. Even some 8bit looking pixel art style games do this. What look like a bunch of tile mapped graphics and sprites are actually models and textures.

Modern 3d engines have fairly large runtimes and a lot of bloat. Choosing to make a 2d game with a 3d engine gives a dev a lot more control over effects but also comes with the penalties of needing all the 3d stuff from the engine.

Just taking a quick look at a couple games I have Animal Well and Axiom Verge come in under 1GB. Animal Well is like 100MB or something. I would guess both of those games are true 2d games. Both Blasphemous games are several gigabytes. Blasphemous 1 is like 6GB and Blasphemous 2 is around 3GB. All four of those games are pixel art and sprites but I would guess the Blasphemous games were made using a 3d engine.

 

[moonbits]

Oh that's a never ending rabbit hole; if I were naive I'd just say they don't compress things but even some of those 50-70gb games have been compressed. Sometimes it's the audio, sometimes it's the engine itself which is hilarious, or the assets, or the way the game is made to pull all those assets.

 

[HyperTurboFox]

A lot of 2d games aren't really 2d. They use a 3d game engine and just position the camera so the game looks 2d. Even some 8bit looking pixel art style games do this. What look like a bunch of tile mapped graphics and sprites are actually models and textures.

Modern 3d engines have fairly large runtimes and a lot of bloat. Choosing to make a 2d game with a 3d engine gives a dev a lot more control over effects but also comes with the penalties of needing all the 3d stuff from the engine.

Just taking a quick look at a couple games I have Animal Well and Axiom Verge come in under 1GB. Animal Well is like 100MB or something. I would guess both of those games are true 2d games. Both Blasphemous games are several gigabytes. Blasphemous 1 is like 6GB and Blasphemous 2 is around 3GB. All four of those games are pixel art and sprites but I would guess the Blasphemous games were made using a 3d engine.

No wonder why most devs used Unreal, Unity and Godot as their standard of choices even they can easily use a actual 2D Game engine like Game Maker or Construct.

 

[Sackboy]

because devs dont give you the choice to download or not download the 8k super mega blowjob textures and uncompressed audio. that and skins. if they just seperated high res texture packs and hd audio, games would be half the size, still not small mind you because games are naturally bigger (the average modern game should be 30-70 gigs thats the optimization sweet spot).

the biggest problem is that all these games not only are incredibly large, but hard require ssds, when you put that into the money you spend on an ssd, each game takes about 17 dollars JUST TO BE STORED (if my math is correct), and thats not even factoring in the download cost and the cost of the game

 

[Graw]

No wonder why most devs used Unreal, Unity and Godot as their standard of choices even they can easily use a actual 2D Game engine like Game Maker or Construct.

Godot actually has a true 2d game engine. I'm not sure about unity, I don't think unreal does. Using a 3d engine gives you a lot of versatility you wouldn't have otherwise. Laziness probably also plays into it. It's easier to do some things with a 3d engine using a 2d perspective than it would be with a 2d engine.

 

[RetroCasual]

I think that it is generally provoked by unoptimized game data, maybe due to not crash the games with future updates, but the main problem is the poor storage capacity by default from the actual gaming systems...
For example, it's ridiculous when you get a PS5 and you can't have installed at least 6 or 7 games within... It has the same storage capacity as a PS4, but the games take up twice or three times or more the size than before because of the 4K resolution, textures, HDR, raytracing... Then you realize that if you want to get a decent storage capability without building a Frankenstein (by attaching external HDD units to the console) you are forced to buy an internal MM2 unit which costs you approximately the half of the new console... So that's the big fail, on purpose.
In fact, this a problem which comes inherited from the past generation, but then we got decent HDDs by default inside the consoles and nobody really complained when a big game took up 20 GB instead of 12 GB. A HDD of 1 TB was O.K. for 720p or 1080p in a gaming console, but not now for 4K.
So there you got my answer to the question of the thread: money, money, money and more money. ?

 

[Bakuma1997]

*Crash into thread wearing foil hat*

BIG COMPANIES MAKE CRAP COMPRESSION SO SSD SELLERS CAN GET MORE MONIS

On serious mode, i think is a Polish the tord situation, bigger graphics equal more space, by selling you cool looking games you are buying not only a space parasite, but also a grenade if your PC can't handle the optimization

As an mostly Indie player i get you, the only AAA on my Pc are Space gluttons, being each one 20 GB (Resident Evil 2 & 3 and the God Eater Duology) and while i enjoyed Ace Combat 7, 60 FRIGGIN GIGAS was too much, even with my fresh 1TB memory, that felt like over kill for a simple arcade style game, all of the AAA mentioned looks great, but Ace Combat 7 is a quick snack game that doesn't need that size

 

[Graw]

For example, it's ridiculous when you get a PS5 and you can't have installed at least 6 or 7 games within

This is intentional. If you can only have a few games installed that means you're buying DLC and microtransactions in those games and not other games. Game companies moved hard into the games as a service mindset years ago. It forces people to keep playing games they otherwise would have dropped because of the sunk cost fallacy. 'Do I really want to uninstall this game I've spent hundreds of hours playing and spent a bunch of money on to install this shiny new game I might not like from a different developer?'

 

[LiberoVulpes]

Companies make crap optimization to trick people into thinking they need new GPUs so NVIDIA and AMD get stonks.

 

[King Koopa's iconKing Koopa]

Probably takes too long since gaming devs are often rushed. They just assume we'll accept it and figure out a way to make space for it.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24]

Poor compression standards.

What eats the most is uncompressed .wav files and Textures.

Compression = How big they are.
Optimization = How good they run.

I second this. You have no idea how much GOOD audio takes up until you are in the scene. Lord have mercy, audio recordings are SO MUCH STORAGE.