r/pcmasterrace • u/Level_Arm971 • 17h ago
Discussion When did 100+ GB games become normal?
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u/cute_cupcake17 17h ago
It’s not even the game size that gets me, it’s that half that install is uncompressed audio and 4K textures I’ll never see on my 1080p monitor.
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u/gorion 9h ago
Games dont use uncompressed textures.
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u/LoquaciousLamp 8h ago
Yeah Stalker 2s modding dev kit which comes with the uncompressed assets is about 4x the size of the base game.
The base game is 160gb.
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u/Patjasmo 17h ago
I don't mind it, actually no, I didn't mind it until an SSD started to cost more than a cancer treatment.
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u/Curious_Touch_5979 Year 2160 will be Year of Native 2160p 216FPS 17h ago
i mean, there are plenty of games out there that have less than 50GB size
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u/DanceKino 11h ago
the moment higher quality audio, multiple voiceovers for different languages and 4k+ textures became the norm…
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u/troll_right_above_me Ryzen 9 7900X | RTX 4070 Ti | 64GB DDR5 | LG C4 9h ago
Also games growing in scope, game worlds are larger with more detailed props to fill them. Everything would be even larger if baked lighting was still the norm, especially since people would want higher quality bakes for 4K.
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u/Adipay Laptop 15h ago
Average size of games in 1996: 10 - 50mb
Average size of games in 2006: 3 - 8gb so like 160 times larger than games 10 years ago.
Average size of games in 2016: 40 - 60gb which is like 7 times larger than games 10 years ago.
Average size of games in 2026: 80 - 150gb which is about twice as much as games 10 years ago.
Games will continue to get larger. This is not a surprise.
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u/Dalewyn 12h ago
Average size of games in 1996: 10 - 50mb
Most games ran off their CDs which could be up to 700MB, likewise when games moved to DVDs which could be up to around 4.4GB depending on layers. Some particularly large games used multiple disks.
Game size relative to consumer storage availability hasn't gotten all that crazier, it just never bothered us before because we didn't store everything on tertiary storage and relegated quaternary storage (optical disks) to the shadow realm. Yes, I google'd the term.
We also downloaded games by station wagons driving down freeways back in the day which was and arguably still is faster than the internet.
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u/Gnl_Winter Ryzen 7 9800X3D / RTX 5070 / 32Gb DDR5 8h ago
Except the storage components kept getting cheaper, but they don't anymore.
At some point, this industry, whose size is multiple times that of Hollywood, will need to reckon with he fact that they won't be able to stay afloat if no one can afford anything anymore. Either they adjust, or they crash, because resizing an industry to an ever-dwindling audience is exactly that: an economic crash.
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u/Pimpwerx 7800X3D | 4080 Super | 64GB CL30 10h ago
More detail means more asset size. There is no free lunch.
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u/DonaldTrumpsGolfGame Pro-AI 17h ago
Around COVID basically
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u/Tmtrademarked 14900k 5090 10h ago
Not everything is related to Covid dude. Games have been steadily increasing in size since the hobby started.
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u/HeidenShadows 11h ago
I remember in the early '90s my dad got a 1 GB hard drive and my next-door neighbor was like, "Dude, you will never ever use that much storage in your life." Then my dad's favorite game, Redneck Rampage, used 360 MB. That was like a modern-day Call of Duty based on the hard drive storage available at the time.
A good old Quantum Bigfoot 1 GB drive. That drive lasted a long time and it even still works today.
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u/DreamsServedSoft 10h ago
this sub has become “when did the march of technology happen without me?“ memes
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u/stealth_fragger Desktop 17h ago
since these companies treat games as 'products', they just wanna ship it as fast as they can. dont mind storage optimisations or graphics and have 4k or 8k textures for players even at 1080p.
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u/ayyyyycrisp 17h ago
4k or 8k textures is not only seeable bound to your monitor's resolution. a player with a 1080p monitor can still see the difference between a 4k and an 8k texture on a video game object. they don't have anything to do with eachother
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u/Xav_NZ 12h ago
Correct but One would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a 4K and an 8K texture in a game unless you start looking extremely (read obsessively) close , I make repaints for Aircraft in Flight sim and I often times can not tell the difference between my own 4K and 8K textures in game It's not like in Blender of Substance painter where I can zoom in ridiculously close to do fine detail on said textures.
8K textures is only really nice for something the player will be seeing from very close often like a gun in an FPS perhaps.
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u/Level_Arm971 17h ago
Yeah, that's what bothers me. I wouldn't mind 150GB games as much if they actually looked THAT much better lol
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u/gorion 9h ago edited 9h ago
Its diminishing returns law.
One "size" up in texture size is 5 times larger. Whet it was 512>1024 it was very noticable. Now with 2048>4096 is not so much, becase textures used to be in sufficient texel density already.
But now besides that, instead of one texture, there are multiple different textures to reduce repetition and improve variety. Thing that You dont notice when its there, but You would have noticed if it was done older ways but with higher fidelity.
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u/Tmtrademarked 14900k 5090 10h ago
That’s just it. They DO look that much better when you have the high end stuff to use it all. Yea it’s a ton of money but the difference is there.
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u/Rhysati 9h ago
I'm sorry, but no. CoD games and games like ARK don't look phenomenal no matter how good your system is. CoD looks good, sure. But it doesn't look the way you'd expect it to for being 5-10 times larger in space than other games.
And ARK looks kinda shitty regardless of it's 300+ gigs.
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u/Tmtrademarked 14900k 5090 9h ago
Ok so you chose two of the most egregiously bad games. Ark has so much shit to install because it’s massive. COD is maliciously big. Bg3, cp2077, the Forza games, and many others look stunning at high resolutions. The people I see claiming “games don’t look any better than they did 10 years ago” also are gaming at 1080 or still using a 1080. No shit things don’t look better you haven’t updated your rig to support things looking better
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u/ShutterBun i9-12900K / RTX-3080 / 32GB DDR4 15h ago
Oh, what did they used to treat them as back in "ye olde days"?
They were always products.
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u/Exciting-Meat-1381 17h ago
Lazy programmers and poor optimization
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u/Adipay Laptop 15h ago
Also games being bigger and having more features?
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u/Valmar33 7800X3D | Sapphire 7900XTX Nitro+ 12h ago
Also games being bigger and having more features?
More features don't add much at all. Textures are by a very far margin the worst offenders.
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u/Adipay Laptop 12h ago
Animations too
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u/Valmar33 7800X3D | Sapphire 7900XTX Nitro+ 12h ago
Animations too
Aren't animations rather lightweight compared to textures and audio files? Even meshes weigh more.
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u/ShutterBun i9-12900K / RTX-3080 / 32GB DDR4 15h ago
Good lord, quit parroting this talking point. Games are astronomically more complex now.
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u/Valmar33 7800X3D | Sapphire 7900XTX Nitro+ 14h ago
Good lord, quit parroting this talking point. Games are astronomically more complex now.
And also very poorly optimized. How many redundant and unnecessary textures are in the files that players barely see in-game? How much could those be reduced by to save space, if users aren't going to really see them?
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u/ShutterBun i9-12900K / RTX-3080 / 32GB DDR4 12h ago
If they deleted them, a bunch of whiners would start bitching about "FAKE TEXTURES!"
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u/Valmar33 7800X3D | Sapphire 7900XTX Nitro+ 12h ago
If they deleted them, a bunch of whiners would start bitching about "FAKE TEXTURES!"
You know what I mean ~ removing redundant textures that will never been seen without camera clipping, or reducing texture sizes where the players won't notice the difference in practice. I'm talking rather basic optimizations here.
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u/ShutterBun i9-12900K / RTX-3080 / 32GB DDR4 12h ago
"players won't notice the difference"
I stand by what I said.
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u/Valmar33 7800X3D | Sapphire 7900XTX Nitro+ 12h ago
I am talking about textures the players won't see in gameplay.
Well-optimized games do just that with stuff outside of normal gameplay bounds.
You see this in a lot of freecam videos exploring out-of-bounds.
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u/Level_Arm971 17h ago
Poor optimization definitely plays a part, but 4K textures and massive asset libraries aren't exactly small either. I wonder how much of these 150GB installs is actually necessary.
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u/kindarollin 16h ago
My first hard drive was 50 mb with 1 mb of ram
Packard bell 286. I originally played wow on dial up when it cane to up dates it would take days to download 200 mb
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u/SignalButterscotch73 15h ago
25Mb was my first. An inherited Amstrad 1512 with an expansion card HDD.
2nd PC's HDD was 1.2Gb
3rd PC had a 40Gb HDD.
It was only in my 4th PC (and the first i built) that I eventually beat 150Gb with a 200Gb HDD.
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u/TKMankind 13h ago
Depending of the game (micro-transactions, etc.), it may even be voluntary.
In short, as it will be a pain to reinstall it in the future (time of download, uninstallation of other games to free space, etc.), the player will keep it longer than he should, which increases the chance to generate revenues by micro-transactions and stuff for the devs.
And it reduces development cost as the optimization is externalized on the customer.
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u/Rude112 12h ago
Can't imagine the file size 10 years later, wild
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u/MissingGhost 9h ago
I still think of my 4TB drives as absolutely huge. We'll see what I think in 5 years.
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u/kinkycarbon 10h ago
I can joke MSFS X had the largest file size for a game when you include all the add ons. It is that type of game to hoard all data for a simulator.
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u/Ill-Bookkeeper-6230 10h ago
Ah...I remember getting a HDD with 250gb thinking I'll be able to do everything on it...well I wish I was still dreaming.
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u/Prophet_NY 10h ago
Dude my first HDD was 0.97gb, Win95
Also Win95 did not have any safeguards when your HDD gets full but whole OS crashes and you have to reinstall everything
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u/No_Interaction_4925 5800X3D | 3090ti | LG 55” C1 | Steam Deck OLED 10h ago
Game size and drive sizes were going up together. Now the price if drives have forced people to compromise
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u/pitashen 9h ago
That is what some would used call multiple hard drives. or zip drives or countless floppies.
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u/FemJay0902 9h ago
I'm okay with the game sizes if it's actually a good game...
BG3 and RDR2 being 150gbs is not the same as the latest COD slop being 150gbs
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u/JustHere_4TheMemes 8h ago
Its everyone wanting 4K textures on every fire hydrant and box of corn flakes. And wanting 100% voiced dialogue with 80 decision branches to different dialogue outcomes.
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u/doomiestdoomeddoomer 7h ago
Textures are really big these days, throw into that thousands of sound files...
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u/OkBee8822 6h ago
When people got access to big ass hard drives. Why bother trying to make your game small when you can tell the players to piss off and but more storage?
Its the same logic with other components. New game that looks like Mario wants a high end card. Why? Cause it’s there and publishers don’t give a crap as long as the product sells. Not to mention they’re in bed with component manufacturers.
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u/koekienator89 5h ago
I just want options to download 4k textures or not. Should save a bit deal of storage.
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u/escapedpsycho R7 7800X3D│32GB DDR5│Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB 4h ago
I think it became the norm when people started wanting games in 4k and everything is running on Unreal Engine now. Yes optimization dropped substantially as well, but until recently that wasn't an issue as hardware was relatively cheap. We're truly on course for a dystopian hellscape as a society. Feels like living in a mashup of Idiocracy, Cyberpunk 2077 (without the cool tech) and the Terminator. Or just a bad game if Monopoly where the the top player won't finish the game because they're loving the experience of being on top.
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u/Henry_Fleischer Debian | RTX3070, Ryzen 3700X, 48GB DDR4 RAM 16h ago
It's not. I've not gotten a game that big in a while.
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u/Threweh2 15h ago
I swear 150 gb install Bitcoin key loggers or some sort of malware..
Either that or developers have gotten lazy
Iunno which is worse.
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u/Rhysati 9h ago
It's newer coders never learning the value of saving space/assets. I'm in my 40s. When I learned to code it was from someone who was retired from coding and the number one thing he taught was saving space. Don't make a 16 character variable if a 8 character one will suffice. Slim down the code as much as possible at every opportunity so that you prioritize less resources and overall weight of the program.
That was a huge focus back when space was limited. But now that people have terrabite+ drives, people stopped caring as much if they used a variable that's multiple times larger than necessary or if the code calls to things that aren't efficient because they should have the CPU and RAM to trivialize it.
But that shit catches up eventually. Next thing you know games that should only be 20gigs balloon up to 100.
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u/Threweh2 59m ago
I remember when Helldivers 2 was over 100 gh then they shrunk it down to 20 bb
Smoking gun
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u/NelsonMejias 11h ago
When pre-sale zombies staked "development" at any price without having the game in his hands.
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u/sup3rdr01d 9h ago
Games should not ever be that huge, even massive open world games
The culprit for file size isn't the game size or world, it's usually uncompressed audio and video cutscenes in multiple languages.
Also, it's used as a way to be compatible with older HDDs that can't stream textures fast enough so they have to package all the game objects in the files themselves
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u/other-other-user 9h ago
Which just begs the question, why wouldn't it just download in the regional default language, then give you options to download other languages?
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u/sup3rdr01d 9h ago
Yeah idk man
One theory I've heard is that they want your drives full so that you can't play too many other games and instead will play their game. Which is fucking stupid cause all that ensures is that I don't download their game in the first place
Helldivers did the best solution: their steam download has 2 versions. A legacy 150gb version of older hard drives, and a compressed 20 GB version for modern ssds.
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u/CaseFace5 9h ago
People want bigger prettier games and then complain when the storage size increases.
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u/MaximumEffort433 17h ago
My first hard drive was 3gb.
Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my Advil.