Why are Games so BIG now?

stryxo returns after nearly 2 months to rant about the absurd filesizes of modern AAA video games.
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Part of the script until i hit word limit:
Is this not ridiculous to anyone else? We are on the 9th generation of consoles, NINTH, and one of the biggest hangups I have to deal with is that 667gb of usable, default storage, all of a sudden, isn’t that much. Go back a couple decades and I’m 90% sure I could fit the entire playstation 2 line up on 667 gigabytes. Yet in 2024 I get to download Red Dead Redemption 2, Fifa 23, the Call of Duty HQ hub thing or whatever it is, FF7 Rebirth, and the Demon Souls remake. Five whole games, and the thought that I’d want to add Elden Ring on top of this means I’ll only have 7 free gigabytes of space to, play bomb rush cyberfunk, or balatro. If I want to play skyrim, I’ll have to uninstall one of these games, or I’m encouraged to spend 90 dollars on a special edition storage upgrade so that I won’t have to worry about this issue.
I can’t even rely on game discs anymore because some of them are straight up just keys for a digital download nowadays, which can only make me feel a certain type of way for deciding to spend an extra 100 dollars on a disc drive.
Also just to preface this video, while doing research for all the file sizes for these games, not only are their discrepancies between PC and Consoles for the same game, but some people just have varying install sizes? I know some games are updated after the fact to optimize storage, otherwise I don’t know. I saw nearly 10 different accurate file sizes for just one game, and I can only imagine why, so if I happen to get the exact gigabyte number of a game wrong, apologies. Just imagine the numbers I say are a general amount.
Anyways it’s not like i’m exactly breaking ground by talking about this, it’s no secret that the file sizes for certain AAA games are absolutely massive now. Nearly every other month you see a brand new headline for an article by PC Gamer, Kotaku, or IGN talking about how the next call of duty, or the next big triple AAA game set to come out is some absurd number of gigabytes. And everyone can tell it’s absurd, to the point that it is a real, genuine conspiracy big developers like Activision are purposefully bloating the size of their live service games so you’re less likely to free up space on your drive to play something else. At a certain point I can’t even blame them, because here’s Modern Warfare 2019, and here’s Modern Warfare 2020(3). On the left is a 159 gigabyte game, on the right is a 240 gigabyte game. 81 gigabytes of difference.
You’re probably wondering how any of this possibly came to happen, and to answer that we need to back up a bit, a bit further, little bit- WOAH, TOO FAR, FORWARD, okay, perfect, 1996. Let’s take a look at the size of some N64 games, because when this console came out, these cartridges could hold up to a maximum of 64mb of data. Some games like Dr. Mario 64 were put on carts that could only hold 4mb of data, which looking at gameplay of this yeah that tracks. Some other games were bigger, like Super Mario 64 coming in at 6mb, or Starfox 64 at 10mb. Only a few games were actually put on the 64mb carts, like Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Paper Mario, Pokemon Stadium 2, and Resident Evil 2.
Jumping forward just 5 years, the GameCube comes out and introduces it’s own specialized format of mini DVD’s that can hold ~1.5gb of data. StarFox Assault comes in at a whopping 1.3gb in size, and Super Mario Sunshine comes in at 1.35gb in size. For the StarFox franchise, that’s a 129x increase in file size in just five years, and for the Mario franchise, it’s an even larger 224x increase in size, which sounds absurd, because it is. Taking a look at it visually really puts it into perspective, with each dot representing one megabyte. Super Mario 64 is 6mb, and Super Mario Sunshine is 1350 megabytes.
The rate of change we’re working with is like if Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018 and people were shocked about a 150gb file size, then 5 years later Red Dead Redemption 3 came out and was 33 Terabytes.

[@thatcat_]

Thats one of the many reasons I appreciate Fromsoftware's games. Elden Ring is less then 50gb and Sekiro is only 14gb. Optimization is super important and more AAA studios need to realize that. Edit: Stop replying saying that the performance side of optimization is bad in Fromsoftware games, it is, I was talking about optimization purely in terms of space

[@godot1785]

what are you for real?`i dont like thoose souls like games but that is really amazing and i apreciate it really when they optimise their games well!

[@thatcat_]

@@godot1785 Yeah, its for real, even Dark Souls Remastered in only 6.86 GB, although tbf it is a remaster of a 12 year old game. Still though, I agree, definitely appreciate good optimization, I prefer that to crazy fancy graphics honestly.

[@MtnDew4828]

@@thatcat_ glad they can run well even if capped to 60 (and anyway you can probably get a mod to uncap it) they are probably the only company that ive played pc ports that actually ran well which should be the norm

[@PocoPoco-zp8jc]

He is transphobic

[@GeneBodem]

The performance is horrid. Just the PC port in general. Good optimization in space tho

[@jmtradbr]

Modern games are 200gb nowadays because no one is limiting them. If Playstation and Xbox one day said that a game above 100gb would pay double server fees they would magically optimize their games.

[@CoralCopperHead]

Or Sony and M$ would start making bank... damn, get me on their marketing team, I don't care which one.

[@mereizaa]

@skaterpoopypants thats absolute dog shit microshit flight simulator is 250gb forza horizon 5 is 170 GTA V is 90 Fortnite is 110 even smaller games like FNAF:SB still come in at almost 70 gb and all of these are without considering DLC.

[@xxminecraftxdpro_123roblox3]

​@@mereizaaHoly, I had no idea Fortnite was that huge, I recall that it used to be like 14GB a few years ago..

[@mereizaa]

@@xxminecraftxdpro_123roblox3 yea, a few years ago it was. then you compare it to 2 days ago when epic served me a 47 gb update for season 3... absolutely ridiculous.

[@yag821]

@@mereizaa OG doom: allow us to introduce ourselves

[@randomargument972]

❌Increase map size ❌Increase game content, missions and perks ✅Increase images and unimportant files that nobody notices

[@Alexstilldraws2nd]

192 likes with no replies? Let me fix that

[@xxrodangamerzxx3177]

True

[@jaywerner8415]

Yeah.... The Microtransactions.

[@FurryestX]

4k texgures for the roof of the houses, that you see up close twice in the game... WTF

[@servo_developer_uncool]

Ah yes, bloatware

[@PsySlik]

They're poorly optimized because AAA games aren't passion projects anymore, they're products. The end.

[@Pannikin_9]

still plenty of great games to play

[@Wierie_]

Crazy deadlines and 4k textures, that’s why

[@mylittledarkworldjohn4289]

Optimization and the forcing of having also 4k textures that the majority can't use/ see the difference.

[@ryanbhadain5867]

What about RDR 2 ?

[@mylittledarkworldjohn4289]

@@ryanbhadain5867 according to google 150gb. Sooo, still counts i would say.

[@joshuatheawesome9440]

Big shoutout to the developers of warframe who did an optimization update years ago that cut the filesize in half without removing any content.

[@coriklocek1841]

I played warframe on my mf $100 college laptop in 2015

[@mylittledarkworldjohn4289]

Its funny cause they went. Games to bloated, gonna decrease size and actually didn't do like 5gb but i think went from 60 back to 40, by using other methods of compression and code reduction

[@thegrouchization]

Exact sizes vary, but the current total size of Warframe is ~40GB, which is only about 10GB larger than it was five years ago. With that in mind, consider all of the things that were added between then and now, including but not limited to multiple tilesets and open landscapes, dozens of classes and who knows how many weapons and enemies. To be quite honest I'm half convinced that the coders at DE are actual wizards.

[@Tanblch]

Got banned for 12 years. Chat moderation can go fuck itself there

[@thegoldengamer5787]

It's why DE are the best game developers out there. They genuinely care about the players and don't see us as mindless cashcows like most devs do.

[@Tony_Goat]

I come from the future. Black Ops 6 is 309.85 gigabytes and requires an always online connection because the game still needs to download textures on the fly.

[@conscripthornet4430]

loading screens for your loading screens in a 310 gb game

[@minodab492]

I do want to say a few things, just for clarification. 1.) It isn't actually 300 gigabytes, that'll be the size of a full CoD HQ install, however, you are able to remove Warzone, MWII, or MWIII from that install. You can look up how for your platform. MWIII also doesn't require MWII be installed. 2. I believe the current CoD does this, it just doesn't require it be always online since they have the Offline Mode.

[@conscripthornet4430]

@@minodab492 100 gb call of duty games are still not acceptable they’ve been pulling this shit since like bo3 because they cut corners optimizing their games. Every call of duty has been exactly the same gameplay and graphics wise for the last 8 years. If you are going to take the same amount of space as RDR2 I expect you to be as good as RDR2.

[@DeeMulaah]

​@@minodab492 Or, they could just....NOT take up a boatload of space so you can have the game in its entirety at once.

[@coritooty]

What's the size of GTA 6? 🥲

[@PolygonDonut]

Okay but what if... They start selling mini SSDs that plug into a PC with the game pre-installed, and we reverse back into another age of physical media XD

[@_.Sc.y]

thats actually not a bad idea

[@Butterscotch_96]

Basically just cartridges again.

[@todesziege]

Then they could no longer invisibly offload the cost to you. They'd never go for that willingly.

[@ayt_a]

Almost sounds like a 'cartridge' or 'disk' or something 😯🤔🤯

[@Bananazz.z]

Hate to say, that's a good solution.

[@Phirestar]

I’m willing to believe that idea that publishers are intentionally bloating game sizes in order to discourage people from uninstalling them / downloading other games so that they’ll continue playing their game. That 100% sounds like something they’d do. At the same time though, I think there is an easier answer: complacency. Companies are so used to having no limitations that they don’t bother thinking about compression or optimizing their games’ file sizes. If the game’s too big or takes too long to download, that’s viewed as the customer’s problem to fix by going and buying another storage device, or upgrading their internet plan. Limitations breed creativity, innovation, or whatever they say. Back when cartridges or discs has only a few MB / GB, they couldn’t pull this shit. If you didn’t compress your game into the space given to you, you weren’t selling that game to anybody.

[@xandertreelimb]

That's a really good point. When you have the limited space of a disc of course you'd optimize as much as possible. Probably a big reason companies want to switch from physical so badly.

[@anthonyfernandez82]

I'd simply uninstall their shitty, bloated games and forget about them and install much better games. Not a good strategy

[@zemtophire]

Since more game discs are just becoming keys to download via the internet, maybe there should be a law that publishers should compensate our data usage (especially with how ridiculously huge games are becoming like mw3) for a certain amount of GB used. Just an idea though, maybe that can deter game publishers/devs from relying on consumers for the internet usage to be their problem, so they can instead prioritize optimizing, compressing, and creating games bug free as possible for game discs so day one patches won’t be so big. Not sure how this can go through any bills, but just a thought! Maybe that way, physical games can be preserved to scare off the digital only movement

[@elone3997]

@@zemtophire Having it financially hit a company is the only way that getting a solid day one release would happen (regarding the offending companies that have shown their true colors).

[@Mabayu]

@@zemtophire Unfortunately the likely of that happening is insanely low unless its from EU tbh. Although, Nintendo is amazing for physical media, and is my go to everytime as the full games after cartridge revisions (for stuff like pokemon) are on the cartridge itself 100% all dlc/updates included).

[@lavenderpsycho]

Hearing the sizes for some of these games gave me a heart attack i have about 90 gigs remaining i cant download anything anymore

[@nitroxylictv]

Pro tip: You are slowing down your Xbox/PlayStation if you have less than 20% of the storage space left. Seriously, SSDs, once they reach 80%+ capacity start to wear out faster and take longer to read/write data. The more space you have free on your SSD the faster it will run. A fully reset PS5/Series X with only one game will load instantly.

[@YuriDDLCFan]

Honestly most of my games are just games that released years ago and aren’t full of gigs

[@Samurai_2552]

This was legit me during the end of the ps4's lifecycle sad I had like only four or five games.

[@mrmangbro6842]

​@@nitroxylictvthat's not true it's HDD that are affected. You aren't physically searching for the data them being 1 or 99% full changes nothing

[@Waskomsause]

@@mrmangbro6842 SSDs slow down due to them having to look for blocks to write data to and pull from. HDDs are hit worse, but an SSD is also hit, in a small way, by this.

[@Izhen_UwU]

Switch games have less file size since they compress EVERYTHING so they can sell games on a SD CARD.

[@thebeast7590]

and they make amazing games totk is less than 16gb there is no reason things need to be that big (also small note switch cartridges are nand flash not emmc so its not sd card levels)

[@GeneBodem]

True but the models are less quality, the NSZ file format is a life saver for the switch imagine downloading every game in xci or nsp.

[@gnomaki]

And no one complains because the games are made to be fun to play and not to stare at some texture and say how good quality it is. Also the audio doesn't sound compressed at all.

[@Izhen_UwU]

@@gnomaki there's some cases of compressed audio in Switch Games but I only noticed when Digital Foundry showed a comparison. not really noticeable actually.

[@NorthSudan]

and its worth noting that you can still get competent games on the platform. Witcher 3 for example had effort put into porting, they fit it onto a cartridge, and it only has some minor frame drops in populated cities. Before they released the next gen update last year you didnt even have a day 1 patch iirc. If ubisoft or activision made witcher 3 instead, half the game would be required patch and it would be at least 100 gb.

[@lilbltxh]

the new mortal kombat game is the worst of this i’ve ever seen 135GB for a fighting game almost on par file size with rdr2 makes 0 sense

[@TheRealNintendoKid]

and it's still the same shitty 2D fighting its always been.

[@Spearra]

AND not everything is included either. So it could always increase due to the massive amounts of DLC most modern fighting games have.

[@niemand7811]

Sometimes I wonder about such big file sizes myself. Forza Horizon 5 was already big for a drIving game. And yet as its been said MK1 eats this much? How many fighters, arenas, fatality moves etc are in there? This game must be home to 300+ fighter characters and other boogaloo.

[@lordlightskin4200]

@@niemand7811forza horizon had irl scans of over 500 vehicles and a giant empty map ofc it’s gonna be high in storage lmfao

[@collinmaikuva3599]

Bruuuuuh, what?!

[@hauntCS]

funny how a game can be 200GB but so little content

[@saricubra2867]

Halo MCC, 125GB that has 6 games with 2 remasters/remakes in one with new movie-like cutscenes and additions, totally worth it 😎

[@somehoodedguy]

​@@saricubra2867 yessir I got halo mcc, Bo2,Waw, skyrim, and fo4 installed for about the same as the cod HQ 😂

[@HunterAnsorge-ok9jk]

It’s mostly shaders your old console or weak pc will never touch

[@somehoodedguy]

@HunterAnsorge-ok9jk ok buddy 👌 you're just so cool have you ever touched a woman though?

[@QuantumChrist]

​@@HunterAnsorge-ok9jk, only few millions of pc can use thay🗑️🤢🤢🤢 majority of pc user are broke as fuck, only has garbage pc.

[@randomannoyance]

minecraft in 2009: a few megabytes in your appdata folder for years of good memories some random аss shooter in 2024: 200 gb and a day of downloading for a week of your typical generic soulless triple A experience

[@DatGuy12345]

Just give me 500 mb of space, Minecraft 1.12.2 some mods and i'll have fun for 5 years.

[@AdroitElk]

Metal Gear Solid V (An open-world game (that totally kicks ass)) is only ~26 gigabytes. Call of Duty is the bane of my existence

[@jozimastar95]

Pokemon white is 50 megabyte

[@millo7295]

And then there's Fortnite

[@ianswift3521]

why even play anything made after about 2015

[@sk2galway]

The file size increasing is the reason I have to wait like 3 days to play a game I bought, I actually hate call of duty now, I used to be a call of duty fanboy, now I don't even buy them. I wouldn't mind the look of games being on par with Advanced Warfare even older. We're at a point where increasing the polygon number exponentially doesn't make much of a difference in looks, they could make lower quality models and people wouldn't notice as much. Anyways, Great video Stryxo, it's a very interesting topic.

[@notme8232]

I wouldn't mind if all games looked like PS3 games, those looked mostly fine. Hell, most games could get away with PS2 graphics. I played MGS3 for the first time last year, and I was surprised just how well it holds up.

[@DrDementia]

@@notme8232 I say that same thing when I play through the old transformers games on the 360. War for cybertron is definitely my favorite

[@sk2galway]

​@@notme8232 exactly

[@sk2galway]

​@@DrDementia ya , there's not much of a jump between PS3 and PS4, there's a bigger one between PS2 and 3

[@raven75257]

The best part is that this will also dramatically decrease developing costs. Which is, you know, one of the biggest reasons why games these days either come out as failures, or come out immensely un optimised. Point is, stylised > realism any day

[@painzrt7928]

Can't wait for GTA VI to be the first game to break the terabyte barrier

[@William11987]

if RDR2 is 116GB then imagine GTA6...

[@Sam-kk5gn]

It’s not gonna surpass 300gb

[@btfo420]

@@Sam-kk5gnand you think 300gb is little??

[@FryzerTopOne]

@@William11987just look at horizon forbidden west

[@BraydenBomb2006]

@@btfo420for gta 6 relatively yes

[@Theguyoverthere603]

Meanwhile the Warfame devs perform eldritch sorcery every few years by halving their game size while somehow doubling their playable content lol

[@orionstarbelt9822]

They have have an army of child space-ninja-wizard-mutants to do the dark magic for them

[@cerealmama3879]

Void sorcery 😉

[@roguespartan2854]

They tapped into some Void magic shii, it's alien space magic, I'm tellin' you

[@heyheyduskyhere]

Belkan witchcraft perhaps

[@CoralCopperHead]

While also making the game run exponentially worse and having that expanded content be 100% worthless in the greater scope of the gameflow.

[@lake4433]

Splatoon 3 has 133 weapons, 23 maps, ~190 songs, a fuck ton of sound effects, 344 clothing items, 444 locker decorations, and is able to look as good as it does all in 8.4 gigabytes. Yeah other AAA studio are doing something wrong lol.

[@saycap]

S3 is 4.3 gigabytes????? I figured it would be way more

[@davidhower7095]

Official website says 8.4, not including content updates

[@lake4433]

@@davidhower7095 I looked at an incorrect source that’s my bad. 8.4 is still way smaller than everything else tho

[@lake4433]

@@saycap yeah it is I was way wrong lol

[@the.bog.]

The extra space is literally just 4K cosmetic textures. COD is PRINTING money with skins, and every new skin adds more bloat

[@sonic_enjoyer]

this got recommended to me after finding out bo6 is about 310 gb

[@jmsaucedo2003]

Or mw2022 dlc

[@dorktales254]

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice won Game of The Year with 18GB of disk space

[@patrickplus9815]

That game looks really good

[@DaakkuuYRS]

As far as I recall from playing it, it was actually 13 gb (without the updates) and it looks so good.

[@mauauauauaua14]

@@DaakkuuYRS i think it's the best looking fromsoft games, even a lot more than ER. it just looks so painterly

[@sylvester2395]

​@@Kharn526 you're missing the point completely.

[@arathyn8294]

​@Kharn526 Tears of the Kingdom is also like 18 gigs or so, and I'd say that's an incredibly accessible, very recent title. Minecraft and Terraria are a few MB, and you know how universally well these games are recieved. .....so what's the point?

[@Woopor]

You know things are getting bad when your average AAA is only half the size of Ark instead of a third

[@Melrieoi]

The dlc's are what bloat ARK. SE at least, 60 for the base game but season pass 1 makes it ~260, for a few maps?

[@Lost1ntheSauc3]

Now that's a game that could use some optimization.

[@CoralCopperHead]

@@Melrieoi 60 is still far too much.

[@AutisticIrish]

@@CoralCopperHeadnah ark is a giant game with so much replay value

[@levinkandeweer]

​@@AutisticIrishi dont know why Ark is so big, im pretty sure they messed up on optimalisation. Im not sure, but i think my ark gamefolder, ok i have some mods, but its like 400gb its really crazy its just weird. Even though it runs pretty good at all times. NOT talking about Asa though...

[@gabrielnotgabriel9572]

Game discs being keys to a digital download is just INFURIATING.

[@jmsaucedo2003]

Which makes the new cod discs worthless

[@BladeOfSteel-Sword_Saint]

Likely just a way of preventing trading.

[@KaiSong-vv7wh]

nothing eats storage like - textures - splines (trajectories, animation paths, virtual camera rails, ...) - good audio (not mp3) - vertex shaders (with pre-baked maps for every cycled weather effect)

[@garlicbread2069]

Yeah splines are huge, I remember hearing somewhere that 25% of the file size in the new COD is just splines.

[@Wesmoen]

What I find hilarious about splines. A competent programmer can easily replicate that system by using a breadcrumb pathfinding algorithm. Using basically no storage space because it's rendered during runtime. But splines are visually easier to implement for designers and rigid.

[@loldoctor]

@@Wesmoento be fair to the devs, they can only do what they’re given the time and resources to do. AAA publishers no longer care about saving memory if it gets them paid. Hell, you could argue that occupying more space forces players to limit what games they have installed and therefore makes them more likely to play those bigger games simply due to less space for competition.

[@RustyShackleford556]

Why do splines take up so much space? Aren't they basically just lists of coordinates?

[@Wesmoen]

@@RustyShackleford556 it's precalculated. Just like pre-rendered video. Graphical shaders have this issue as well.

[@Aether776]

I'm a simple man, if it's more than 60GB, i don't play the game.

[@BattleBoar72]

so you havent played rdr2??

[@doctahjonez]

Ikr, I'm not waiting weeks for these things to download.

[@AlainKing787]

Same

[@SomeCowguy]

I havent either, didnt miss much. Not my style of game atleast​@@BattleBoar72

[@rohankishibe8259]

​@@BattleBoar72 nope, the only thing bigger than 60gb is GTA V and Spiderman i believe? Everything else is way less, ghostrunners 1 and 2, subnautica, Minecraft, pes 2013 for nostalgia with my dad and old friends, rocket league, etc... I am a simple man tho, these are fun for me so I don't chase much bigger games.

[@antoniohagopian213]

To get realistic graphics, you don't increase resolution of textures. You change the art style. But that's too much brainpower required.

[@totallynotabot6003]

Art style is everything. Games like dishonored, team fortress 2, half life 2, etc. have all ages well.

[@elielc.8459]

Graphics peaked in mid 2010's and it's all been diminishing returns since then. Seriously, look at games like Batman Arkham Knight (2015), Uncharted 4 (2016) and Order 1886 (2015) and tell me they don't look like they could've been released today. AAA studio's obsession with graphics drives me nuts because it's the main reason behind these insane filesizes aswell as gargantuan game budgets nowadays. It is the biggest waste of resources and time for something that you can barely notice the difference, and leads to studios taking less and less risks because games are so expensive to make now.

[@Larry_Suave]

They actually didn't peak, what's happened is the pixel sizes have reached the point where our eyes physically cannot recognize the difference between smaller sizes. So really all they should be focusing on at this point is color range and depth and fps.

[@benmcreynolds8581]

I fully agree with the OG posters opinions. I miss all gaming up until the 360 era so much. That's pretty much when gaming peaked. Devs should never stop using inspiration from previous game gens. Timeless games don't need hyper realistic graphics. Some of the best games have unique art styles, unique damage effects, smaller more interactive environments, destructible objects, physics like effects or funny cartoonish or absurd type of effects. Anytime i say this someone in the comments always says: "umm well we have indie games" but my point is we need this kind of game selection on CONSOLES as well. PC's have steam & tons of access to a unique library of creative indie projects. Look at the Game Library of the most recent game consoles? Now look at previous generation consoles? There's no competition. It's not even close to the PS2, N64, PS1, Xbox, GameCube, Dreamcast, 360, PS3, etc. If game devs & game companies realize they are wasting such insane amounts of $ & time to make a game that still runs so terribly (no matter if u have the best PC possible. Which proves it's how these games were made. Not the tech hardware needing a upgrade. I bet we haven't even come close to pushing modern hardware to it's limits yet) *So if devs & companies can see it might not take so long to make a game, not cost so much money to make EACH GAME. Give these things a chance to prove they are capable of being timeless. Hopefully we see a resurgence of pure nerdy passion & focus from devs if they are allowed to just focus on smaller passion projects. Especially with today's technological advancements. Previous games should still inspire newer games no matter how far into the future we go. We shouldn't leave those unique aspects of gaming in the past. Hopefully the struggles of the modern day triple AAA games will organically shift change back towards a better direction. I just worry about the gaming industry being at a certain point where people who are severely out of touch with the core gaming community are the ones that are making the most decisions and forcing devs to do things they completely don't want to do because they know it's a bad idea.. I wish we didn't have so many game companies get bought out. I miss when a game was a project worked on by a group of passionate people who decided they wanted to create this passion project.. Now it's like a popular underground band getting bought out by a mega Corp and now they have full say in the way they play music and when they play music and what they say in their music.. I hope gaming snaps out of this dark chapter and they find their roots they left in the wake of the Y2K era..

[@SBImNotWritingMyNameHere]

Crysis 3

[@diablow1411]

Ironically, its not the graphics that take up a good chunk of file size, but the sound files!

[@tablettablete186]

I disagree about hitting the peak, just look at a path tracing (a good implementation) and you will see a massive leap in quality.

[@Allustar]

I think we reached the plateau of video game graphics as well. Like, the improvements are barely noticeable unless you specifically focus on them.

[@simplysmiley4670]

Barely noticable unless you really go out of your way to find them while bloating the file size like crazy for no good reason.

[@akl2k7]

Yeah, there's very little difference between the PS4 and PS5 graphics wise. The newer consoles look a little prettier and have fancy things like raytracing, but that's about it.

[@KonglomeratYT]

I've been hearing this lie for over a decade. The games I first heard it said about look like utter crap by today's standards. Especially over the past few years video game graphics have been exploding. There's a mass migration of 1080p users to 2k. VRAM tripled in 2 generations. LOD is becoming less and less of a limitation. Open world games with no loading screens and no close-up fog are becoming increasingly viable. I can't imagine how anyone can still regurgitate this lie after 10+ years and think it makes any sense.

[@DigitalHaze65536]

@@KonglomeratYT Loading screens are made shorter or eliminated with better SSD read speeds and more RAM. Higher resolution textures work against us there. I can see having everything run true 2160P eventually, the problem is 8K will be shoved down our throats setting us back in terms of world size and loading speeds. My only hope is that AI upscaling will make it so nobody actually uses 8K textures and they max out at 4K.

[@CoralCopperHead]

@@KonglomeratYT Sorry that you've been binge-eating technical specs so long you needed to vomit them all over the comment section. The reason we can keep pointing out this truth is because, well, it's the truth. Assassin's Creed: Valhalla looks worse than Metal Gear Solid 4. If you need any more evidence, you'll need to talk to an optometrist and get your eyes checked.

[@Vysair]

To give you a perspective, I have a 4TB ssd. It holds about 15,000 mkv files in varying size (anime) with 60gb of free space left.

[@bbbxc]

Torrent Seeder?)

[@SomeRandomPiggo]

Average size of 273mb, nice codec lol. My music collection is 2008 files, mostly FLACs which are completely lossless. I guess when you put it that way for audio 35.5GB sounds like a lot

[@Maethendias]

they are not big they are bloated thats a MASSIVE difference theres hundrets of indie games that have UNGODLY amounts of content and a fraction of the size requirements compared to your tripple a of hte week that lasts you for like... a week at most and still runs like garbage

[@gigiobigio0002]

Celeste is a game with an actually good story, peak gameplay and awesome game design and effects and thanks to the fact it uses pixelated assets its still less than 2GB A 2GB game is better than many of todays 150GB games

[@totallynotabot6003]

Indie games keep winning

[@squilliamfancyson5313]

MW3's size consists of 500 megabytes of gameplay, 500 megabytes of graphics, 100 gigs of microtransactions and 149 gigs of recycled content.

[@WildmanTrading]

"Perfectly balanced"

[@NexusKin]

And then you have 2011's "Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3," which has experiences for campaign, spec-ops, survival, and multi-player all on a single physical disc.

[@jozimastar95]

That's not how it works lol , most complex gameplay can't get more then 1 megabyte

[@saricubra2867]

Halo MCC is 125GB, a single game taking more storage space than MCC is 100% asinine.

[@BuckleysPants]

What's crazy is that I think games like Call of Duty benefit from having such a high storage size. If you can only hold 5 games on your console, you're only gonna play the games currently have installed. They are limiting access to other games so you can only buy microtransactions on their game and not the other ones, whether intentionally or not.

[@anthonyfernandez82]

Do normies not uninstall games to install other games or something? I'm only keeping that shit installed if I feel like it deserves that space

[@BuckleysPants]

@@anthonyfernandez82 when games are 150 gigabytes and you actively play them you can't just uninstall and reinstall them easily. It could take hours to do that.

[@Chlocean]

I think stryxo said that in like the first 5 minutes of the video.

[@simplysmiley4670]

@@anthonyfernandez82 Not everyone has zero caps on their internet connection, not everyone has the time to dedicate to just, waiting around for the game to download and install, and if you actively play the games that you have installed, you can't uninstall them and still play them.

[@roar104]

@@BuckleysPants after you play the campaign and delete it, MWIII and warzone together only take up like 80 gb or so, and that's with all the guns and half the maps from the last game included in it as well. It's genuinely a skill issue on your part if your game is 150+ for CoD at this point

[@blok--head7472]

Some say Call of Duty is a joke. Id say the real saps are the ones who keep buying these damn games. You guys allowed this to become the norm. *(Larger file sizes, Over monetization, requiring Warzone just to even play the newer games, and the list goes on.)* Kids cant be the only ones responsible for participating in this endless tomfuckery, lets just be honest here. Have some self respect, people. Smh.

[@fishsayhelo9872]

do not give them the idea about the fucking cross-promo ssds, that is diabolical & you will forfeit your chance for the mercy of our good lord.

[@KonglomeratYT]

I think that would be a funny resurgence of physical ownership.

[@tumultoustortellini]

@@KonglomeratYT Until you realize that they're charging you double for every game (70 for AAA hogwash, 70 for samsung ssds), because they're going to act like you owe them both sets of manhours, instead of putitng them at a reasonable price.

[@UmVtCg]

Hitman world of assasination is 75GB large. However it contains all levels from Hitman 1, 2 and 3. Where Hitman 2 is 149 GB of install size.

[@tabletennisstars1227]

wat

[@Lynn.-_-.]

how did that even happen

[@DakotaRileyAU]

Yeah I bought it in the summer sale and was super confused on what's going on, can someone explain? I'm gonna be playing this after I finish Arkham knights

[@Amin-al-Husseini_1941picture]

@@Lynn.-_-. nowadays theres this thing called "data/code compression" which creates shortcuts. Imagine 2 different images creating a 3rd one essentialy. the other is removing outdated textures and other things that take up alot of space and replace it with something that takes less and is used better im no expert so this is like 90% accurate

[@vanillacoldspore]

@@Amin-al-Husseini_1941picture Compression isn't new; it's been around for ages.

[@bartomolev6682]

buying PC parts is especialy painfull when you're not in the USA.

[@shakirashipslied9721]

Yep, or even buying a new pc. Especially hard in the post soviet countries where the economy is in shambles. I have been saving up money to buy a new laptop soon and checked my local store, and well, the best that I can get costs upwards of 2,500. The "best" available here is barely comparable to what'd be considered "best" in USA.

[@bartomolev6682]

@@shakirashipslied9721 and then when you want to play something newer games can cost 2/3 of a paycheck

[@shakirashipslied9721]

@@bartomolev6682 Yup, and their system requirementa will probably end up being something your current PC will STILL struggle with because Triple-A games have the worst optimization known.

[@xexkansichi]

First game i emulated was Pokemon Crystal. It was 2mb. I played it for 200 hours. It was 2 MB.

[@DaVinc-hi7hd]

same for me just replace it with Pokemon Fire Red for GBA :)

[@xexkansichi]

@DaVinc-hi7hd That was a great game. Make that is. Is a great game.

[@saricubra2867]

I just learned recently that Final Fantasy VI (that is 4MB) was a very, very expensive game in the 90s with a 70 dollar price tag. Adjusted for inflation right now would be like Cyberpunk 2077 + DLC pricing

[@aloe7794]

Into the Breach, a game made by Subset Games, offers you not only the base campaign with 14 of base squads, but it also offers CUSTOM squads. This singlehandedly makes the game SO much more replayable, and it's 500 MB.

[@malo6748]

Games started to grow in ps1 generation era. Before they were only a few mbs in size. Basically the whole console games library before ps1 era fits on a 64GB stick.

[@Nothing_happening_here_go_away]

Rdr2 has a right to be a big game. BUT CALL OF DUTY?

[@lolopannot6660]

gta 6 will be even bigger 😭

[@pa414]

Hot take but the File size for COD might be on par with RDR2, it has to cram the Campaign, Multiplayer and and all its Game modes, WZ, Zombies, and DMZ ( if your feeling extra) all onto one Disc

[@eijitoh6252]

​@@pa414 CoD campaign are shit nowadays. It's just bloatware at this point

[@WorkingLyric217]

Counterpoint, it's not even on a disc. Its barely a couple gigabytes (I think. I remember it being that way when I first got MW2). You have to download EVERYTHING​@@pa414

[@JoopiterGD]

@@pa414 For just MW3 (no wz/mw2), its only a bit over 100gb. 200gb is for a FULL install that includes all parts of mw2 and mw3, which you do not need just to play mw3.

[@WiryMarigold913]

I had an old Samsung tablet about 8 years ago. When I downloaded 20+ games on that thing the storage obviously got full. When I deleted 15+ games, the storage was still full.

[@flarosedub]

I wish games let you choose what graphics presets you wanted to install on pc. It is so annoying when I need to install ultra quality textures when I play on high.

[@simplysmiley4670]

Or when I need to install ultra high end graphics I won't see myself use prolly for my entire life when my PC can only handle lowest settings.

[@sarminder4357]

Installing ultra high textures when I can only play on medium at best is the worst

[@zer0synd1cate]

I love that War Thunder lets you do this, I was able to cut my install from 50 GB to just 5 lol

[@One.Zero.One101]

I bet a huge part of the global gaming community only has a 1080p monitor. That means downloading 4k textures is a massive waste of bandwidth for ISP providers.

[@Arcticgdnmore]

To be honest that is a good and reasonable idea, but it would be a bit clunky tho if you wanted to revert the graphics from f.ex low to high

[@apollojustice5338]

Shout out to Deep Rock Galactic. A 4 player co-op FPS with procedurally generated environments which are fully destructable, satisfying guns (12 primaries, 12 secondaries all with their own customization, 16 throwables, 4 class specific traversal tools, and crap ton of weapon overclocks) varied enemy types, a shit ton of cosmetics, a completely free battle pass system, a hub area with many things to do, amazing multiplayer.......all in 3 GB. Oh and also a very friendly community.

[@Towcj]

Brother. Rock AND STONE!

[@muysli.y1855]

FOOR KARL

[@NostraDavid2]

Rrrrock. And. Stoooone!

[@qui-gonsgin8747]

Thats right. Rock and Stone!

[@SomeCowguy]

The "friendly community" is only true half the time. The reddit page and some elitists are more toxic than any cod lobby ever

[@riufq]

The video starts here 2:30

[@AgedSwissCheese]

3 reasons in my eyes 1. a shift from stylized to photorealistic graphics 2. they are simply products, you purchase, consume, and then discard the product when their next title releases 3. optimization, being almost entirely ignored because the said product will just be discarded usually when the next game releases

[@mossfeathers]

no way..... he returns when the world kinda wanted him back!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@MtnDew4828]

I am earth and i wanted him back too

[@NullAlt]

My goat returns

[@PocoPoco-zp8jc]

He is transphobic

[@bizudamarasengan]

Uncompressed audio exists, 99.99% because the Devs are lazy. Audio compressing is so easy.

[@spartaninvirginia]

This year's call of duty game: $70 (plus microtransactions, maybe, idk), takes a quarter of your 1TB SSD, four hours of campaign mode, multiplayer is the sole focus and this game will be a barren wasteland in 2 years when three more COD games come out. Stardew Valley: $15, no microtransactions, game is about 600MB, nearly infinitely replayable, still getting good updates and community mods after 8 years.

[@simplysmiley4670]

Stardew Valley, my beloved comfort game.

[@simplysmiley4670]

@@_Bungus Bro... Same... Cobbled together a crappy makeshift greenhouse out of junk I found 2 years ago and been growing tomatoes in it for a while. All because of a little, relaxing and amazingly well done farming game.

[@NoName......]

That's a really bad comparison. Of fuck course started valley takes up less space than cod.

[@jona0806]

​@@NoName......Yea. You can't really compare these two games. Not a fan of CoD and a huge Stardew Valley fan. But you can't compare a giant AAA game with an indie game made by a single person released 8 years ago. One is a pixelart game while the other one has realistic graphics. There is no way a modern CoD could be less than a gb of data. Also, saying that you should be playing Stardew Valley instead of CoD is stupid aswell. I doubt that anyone who wants a high action only fps game will get that needs fulfilled by playing Stardew Valley. Atleast recommend another game that is in the same genre

[@notsuper69]

terrible comparison

[@renanleandro5914]

The thing with 4K textures is that you should put them only on important things, like if it's an FPS, put a 4k texture on the weapons, because they are on your screen all the time, or on characters faces, don't put them on every single patch of grass, stone wall or piece of clothing. I know that for experience. My modded Skyrim folder currently has 240GB, most of these are 4k textures.

[@yoshi314]

but then some "reviewers" will nitpick to no end about it. because that one texture is bad therefore entire game is dogsh*t. everyone knows people like that.

[@gaming_gamer483]

So what?

[@CDZRDragon]

What’s impressive is that the engine rdr2 uses is from a rockstar table tennis game which looked good it’s time

[@saleens302extreme]

Originated back in 2006, Rockstar San Diego sure are ahead of their game

[@marcusclark1339]

main reason : retention design discourage you from downloading other games no compression at all, no game should be over 60 GB with good optimization, none of these games have them

[@vanillacoldspore]

Another big reason is the inclusion of so many textures and models that are immensely over-detailed. And that can be fixed easily by just... including the high-detail textures and models as a separate, free package.

[@Interference22]

Half the time it's not even compression: it's terrible, terrible asset management. We're talking 60 unique types of rock, with unique textures, when just four of them, rotated and scaled a bit, would have been enough. We're talking symmetrical meshes that have unique texture space assigned to every part of them, resulting in larger images required to keep the resolution high, even though both sides are completely identical and they could have stacked UV islands on top of one another. We're talking five separate guns that are identical apart from being a different colour and each colour variation is its own texture rather than ONE texture with a line of shader code to tint it. We're talking about a car asset that's in one scene, 400m away from the playable area, that still inexplicably has 4K textures despite being 16 pixels on your screen.

[@freelancerthe2561]

@@vanillacoldspore but how am I supposed to see the dust bits on the rocks with 4k monitor? Next you're gonna tell me upscaling is just as good. /s

[@vanillacoldspore]

@@freelancerthe2561 Well, the developers could make procedural dust using something like shaders.

[@raid1010]

Over 50GB**

[@TheOtherLPer203]

10:30 I know this is probably just a joke but the reason the "remaster" is so large while it looks nearly the exact same is because LITERALLY ALL THEY DID was slap the textures in an AI upscaler and call it a day. Didn't even compress them or anything.

[@Butterscotch_96]

Do they even own the rights to those textures now?

[@miaisnotmortyick]

P3P remaster be like

[@Roxor128]

If you're going to "AI" upscale the textures, you might as well do it at load time. Not to mention if you did, you could limit the scaling to what will actually be visible, saving time and memory.

[@le9038]

It's like as if nobody operates under artificial constraints anymore. If you don't have a good reason as to why your game is 40 GBs, your game is bloated. Period.

[@ARandomUserOfThisWorld]

Yep. If PlayStation and Xbox and steam said “it can’t be above 50 go without a good reason(like rdr2) that is decided by us and is NON NEGOTIABLE” then COD would magically be 40gb. Even if the restriction was 20 gb I bet they find a way to fit cod, it’s just an unoptimised pile of dogshit.

[@goober9446]

2:48 That isn't Dr. Mario 64 gameplay, that is the original NES game.

[@dudemp4]

me when i spread misinformation online

[@dudemp4]

@@GeneBodem i was referring to the video if that's what you mean

[@weed884]

W Wario facts

[@Stryxo]

oops my bad, downloaded the wrong free to use gameplay, thanks for pointing it out!

[@finesseandstyle]

Textures scale geometrically. A 1k texture is 1MB, a 4k texture is 16MB, a difference of 16x. Then factor in that there are the texture maps, normal maps and specular maps for physically based materials, a texture for a single thing in the game is now 48MB. Instead of being creative like reusing textures or optimizing textures size for small models that don't need it, simply ship the game as is without any of that. Then, don't do any texture packing where you put texture, normal and specular maps into a single file where you can seperate them with different RGB channels. Then don't remove assets for stuff that was scrapped or moved into something different. Then don't do any compression. Then do that for every single 3d model in the game that has more than a hundred guns. Then there's sound. You can quickly get a large size if you have lots of different variations of a gunshot or footstep, for every environment (indoors, large closed space or open spaces) instead of using procedural sound. That's how you end up with such a ridiculous file size

[@vitalsignscritical]

Sound is not a problem, why does it have to be compressed we have lossless aac, lpcm, CD audio, DVD audio, HD audio, Opus, Dolby, THX, Surround, many formats, even lossy compresion at decent enough bitrate can be decent. as I understand most games may use a stereo or CD like stored file as a sound effect, but put that into the game engines 3D distance/object oriented system so it can map how closer or further away that sound is, how louder or quieter, how much reverb or rather how it's affected by walls etc. and it's position within the map, like a certain space of environment, buildings, props and senery will genrate certain aucoustics when x gun fires in x certain part of x certain map, I guess more older games did this is a more rudementary round about way mixed with thier (the maps/areas) soundscape, now games like valve's CSGO has HRTF and other simular solutions for real time 3D object based sound, I guess before being so Object based it was more sound emmitors that would emmit the sound based on approximate spacial representation within 3D space. All those Audio Files don't have to be Uncompressed/Raw is my point. Plus given the code technicaly all sounds (*not including dialogue and voices*) could be made in real time using manipulation of Sine Waves, why the could figure the code to implement to reproduce the sound from listening to the recording and just run a precalculated (or patially precalculated at least) version of code to generate the sound in real time I don't know Sound Editors/DAW are pretty instant once you've made the changes, plus the calculated/generated result could be stored in a look up table or in the code or something like that.

[@YayaFeiLong]

@@vitalsignscritical The trouble is AAA studios just don't bother to do all that work for their in-game sound system, likely due to just not having the time to work on it. Instead they just make every single variation of a sound its own separate sound file, so each gun for example ends up having like 300 sound effects each. All those uncompressed sound files start really adding up. And in MW19 it adds up to something like 30GB

[@Raderade1-pt3om]

And then there's .kkrieger at 95kb a 3D FPS th a t generate it's own textures and end of being hundreds of mb when run

[@machinefannatic99]

the problem isnt the game size, developers are just artists trying to create a good experience for gamers, the problem is the canvas are small, computer storage and memory have significantly not improved, for instance ps1 had 4mb ram, and 700mb cds, ps2 had 32mb ram and 9gb dvds, ps3 had 512mb ram and 50gb dvds, ps4 had 8gb ram and 500gb hdd, an increase of 16x the memory but ps5 has 16gb ram and 1tb storage, ths is just 2x the memory and storage, because storage and memory have become expensive, so game sizes always invitably increase but our computers simply wont be able to keep up, this is the reason games since ps4 all look the same and the industry is feeling the pinch, The reason microsoft and sony are closing studios is because its become more expensive to make triple a games, and most of the problem stems from artists and engineers trying to fit and make blockbuster games run on systems with very low resources, its not easy for them because they have to do witchcraft to create games like batman and uncharted 4 run on a ps4

[@3_smh_3]

@@machinefannatic99 > developers are just artists trying to create a good experience for gamers at the cost of absurd electric bills for players.

[@cerberyn]

artificial bloat in an attempt to force players to delete games from their consoles and only play the one massive one. its a disgusting

[@creepbg]

I remember just before the release of the PS4 and Xbone, there was a good few years where the PC version of games had an optional HD texture pack for those that had the space and horsepower and people complained it should be part of the game... We've come full circle it seems

[@Wesmoen]

Laptop and portable users would like to thank them. I wish removing 4k textures was easy to do for many games. Sort of negating the issue. But usually it's well encrypted.

[@hardVatsuki]

@@Wesmoen ubisoft has a good habit of putting ultra textures and videos as separate .dat and .fat files, you can just delete them and game will run as normal. wish their games were worthy to play lol.

[@Wesmoen]

@@hardVatsuki that's awesome for a Ubisoft action. It's nice to see they're somewhat competent.

[@jakethedragonymaster1235]

Every day I miss the DS era...there was the meme of homebrewing a 3ds but even a DSi gives a *crazy* mileage

[@LandonEmma]

FR SAME

[@Butterscotch_96]

@@LandonEmmawhy are you everywhere

[@belstar1128]

a lot of good ds games are like 32mb

[@Kaizala1933]

Game size bloat is one of those cases where E.U regulations are welcome

[@DelaryHap]

While I would agree, I fail to see how this could be regulated, especially long term. There'll be a point in time where certain games will inevitably need 500+GB for good reasons. Not happening anytime soon, but who knows what the future holds

[@kryppo4245]

They’re so inflated so they can get pyro to buy them

[@hevnet]

ayo

[@BanditoDorito6969]

A fellow slop enjoyer

[@yttriusk]

All in le head

[@PsychoRavager]

Ah, yes... the SLOP MASTER's favorite... PURE, UNMITIGATED, UNOPTIMIZED SLOP.

[@JmKrokY]

💀

[@PsychoRavager]

The absolute obsession with graphics and cinematics/cutscenes or flooding their games with microtransaction-filled cosmetics instead of pouring some true passionate love in making good gameplay is what's killing the AAA gaming industry and, pertaining to this video topic, what's causing the file sizes to be absurdly infinite in fatness. And it's one of the reasons I'm sticking with older games from previous generations of AAA studios or just indie games or AA stuff. Have had more fun in that space than anything current-day AAA as of late. And I've mostly stopped bothering with AAA multiplayer since that's where the whole live service bullcrap seeps in harder than lava into someone's bun cheeks. I still remember having fun with friends with Counter-Strike 1.6 without having to desire for constant meaningless updates that only amount to padding the file sizes of games these days. Triple A gaming franchises like COD are only alive because of addiction and the whales. I blame both corporate greed and the filthy whales for pretty much crumbling anything good with this industry.

[@TheMrCHELL]

Of course there a obsession with graphics, otherwise we could just still be playing PS3 and X360. Who would buy a PS5 or a Séries X or build a top PC Gamer to just play low budget indie games?

[@IkeSan]

Also the average gamer has the fault because for some reason making a stylish game with diferent art direction that is not real is a problem for them. Or else look at Zelda Wind Waker case that everyone was pointing out how "childish" it looks. This all the way when 360 started to come out in 2005. Games do not need to look real, games need good artstyle and great gameplay.

[@EMulat-i3j]

ToTK is 16 gigs and has 100 times the value and content that most AAA games with bloated sizes offer today

[@MahalGC]

I've never been a Call of Duty fan, but it's insane how they continue to rehash in this way, and the moment storage becomes expensive again people will stop buying games that take up too much space and only then will companies be forced to offer compressed versions of their games along with the uncompressed.

[@whiteroach3]

Been thinking about this for a while. I think game sizes are so huge now because most developers don't have much of a reason to bother optimizing their titles anymore, even when consoles still desperately need it for some games to run well. There's not a single reason why a game like Doom Eternal should run on the Switch like it was literally made for the handheld, meanwhile Sonic Colors Ultimate (A PORT OF A WII GAME) runs at half the framerate on Switch compared to all the other consoles. Not a single reason AT ALL. There's also a debate going on in the Roblox developer space. Specifically it's about if we need texture resolutions higher than 1024x1024 (which is Roblox's max image size), which... people are already complaining about how much CPU and RAM some games on the platform use now compared to a few years back, and yet they still want higher quality textures that'll only make that exact situation far worse with barely any benefit. I point to the new MW3 being a massive resource hog (what game needs over 200GB????) despite not looking that much better than previous entries as proof that most games really don't need 4K or even 2K textures to still look nice. All it really does 95% of the time is bloat file sizes and use more resources for what amounts to nothing more than a placebo effect. game too big. me no like.

[@simplysmiley4670]

The 4k textures and ultra high resolutions, and whatever graphical fidelity fuckery at this point feels like it's only done for cash whales to shill their games for not even free, but even _paying_ them for playing their games, for that additional bit of marketing.

[@YayaFeiLong]

To be honest I think people overstate the effect of 4k textures on the recent MW games' file sizes. A few months back I bought the MW19 campaign on a sale (it was for research purposes I swear) and found that if you choose not to install any of the multiplayer content the game's filesize goes from 210 GB -> 108 GB. That can't just be a 4k textures problem. My guess is every multiplayer gamemode has its own separate collection of textures and assets for maps, instead of sharing assets with campaign maps. Which is like bafflingly stupid.

[@alexale5488]

Games not being optimized is the reason so many X and S and Pro versions exist. When we had Xbox 360 and PS3, those consoles could run any game that was made for them flawlessly. Now, consoles start to age like PCs and needs replaced not by another generation, but another upgrade. Excuse me? Wasn't that the sole reason of buying a console? You can have it 10 years without worry and play anything without lag? When I heard that "PS4" got old and you gotta buy "PS4 Slim" because normal PS4 lags, I started to laugh.

[@rexcatston8412]

High storage games are basically a hidden fee added to the cost of the game because somewhere down the line you're going to need additional or replacement storage to account for the extra (for example) 1TB you need for just 4-5 games. Even an external 1TB 5400rpm from a reputable company costs $50 or more So thats effectively $10 or more per game on top When you then add all the pc spec requirements just to get a stable frame rate without running your pc at 100 degrees its really not worth it any more. Costs are slowly chipping away at my enthusiasm to play them

[@Hutch2Much]

my argument is that if breath of the wild can be compressed to 17 gb, there’s no reason for these other games to be as enormous as they are

[@GeneBodem]

Don't compare Botw, which has less focus on textures and models and more on the shading to something of a realistic game. a better example is outlast, resident evil 2, MGSV.

[@notme8232]

Frankly, most games really don't need to look much better than Snake Eater, which is about 8gb across 2 disks.

[@josetomascamposrobledano4618]

Brainless comment. ITS A NINTENDO GAME! They are 2 generations behind in their graphics! THERE IS A REASON WHY THEY ARE EMULATED EVERYWHERE! I applaud Fromsoft and Capcom for respecting the player. Capcom more so since their graphics with RE engine are way better than Fromsoft’s. I even applaud Sony games. God of War Ragnarok deserves a lot of praise. Cause on the other side of the argument is Jedi Survivor and FF7 Rebirth reaching 150 GB! Add the GB’s necessary for games to function and you are locked into having 3-4 games! Less if you go for the most insane games like Cod with all content Packages!

[@xtr.7662]

Botw is far from a good example its very well compressed but looking at the game you can see why

[@giganticmoon]

@@GeneBodemre2 is not realistic?

[@JamesMM45]

11:57 i'm really happy someone finally called this out. Seriously, we don't need to have crowbcat level standards for detail in every game.

[@JohnDoe-fp2gv]

Here is an idea: Make downloading skins optional. You want apply a skin to a gun/character? Download it piece by piece. Idc about other peoples skins anways so. Save performance, time and diskspace

[@totallynotabot6003]

Textures should be optional too. I'd rather go for 2k over 4k just for performance and file size.

[@erevinwinter]

Having a Benchmark to then be able to select and download only your graphics settings textures sizes and effects would help a lot. Applies to audio language too.

[@stoneapollyon8313]

I noticed this about as far back as modern warfare 2019. It felt absurd to download such a large amount of data for what seemed like a very small game if compressed and optimized right. Hell, what REALLY grinded my gears was the recent release of the star wars battlefront collection which takes up a whopping 70+ gigs. FOR 6th GEN CONSOLE GAMES!! Clearly these companies are doing this on purpose cause there's no way games of this scale should reasonably take up that much space.

[@Neurolayt]

AAA devs trying to compress their game challenge (impossible)

[@Micchi-]

Simple. They don't want you to install other games. They just want you to play their live service games.

[@sujimayne]

IQ 70 tinfoil hat theory

[@ThadMiller1]

Get a pc

[@selfaware7617]

I just found out recently that all of Mexico, which is a barren wasteland with nothing in it, yet still with collision and 3d architecture, IS IN RDR2. WHAT A WASTE OF GIGS

[@killerwolf9409]

It literally has enviroments you will see once and it still barely uses 120 gigs

[@Jgvcfguy]

Barren wastelands don't take up that much space as they usually consist of a small group of a few assets duplicated everywhere that were probably already in the game

[@mranderson7932]

I don't even bother anymore. Switch is the answer. Nintendo figured this out decades ago.

[@autumn5788]

"yoo this game's file size is so huge, no wonder the graphics are this realistic!" >low graphics, performance upscaling

[@nitroxylictv]

That's the scummy part. 200+gb & DYNAMINC FREAKING 4K. such a scam. at that size the game should be running at a minimum NATIVE 4k.

[@BoyOHBoy123]

Team Fortress 2 has gained like 5 GBs in the past year

[@kjbzabrini768]

Watching after seeing Black Ops 6 being 300gigs on xbox 🤣

[@papakamirneron2514]

I think a push for photo realism is natural and healthy but I do agree that it is often poorly executed and that most games don’t need it (just look at Nintendo games).

[@muysli.y1855]

Not every game need reslism or 4k texturen the most popular games like Fortnite or Minecraft didn't get popular because of Realism or 4k they have just Fun gameplay

[@ThatWolfArrow]

Even putting aside all the issues with optimization and bloat, I think we've reached a point of diminishing returns for graphical fidelity for realistic graphics through raw texture and model fidelity alone. We're on the 4th year of the 9th generation of consoles and I've yet to see games that look that much better than what the best of what the 8th generation had to offer, which is what RDR2 was. Combined with the fact that modern engines and hardware are more than capable of picking up the slack with rendering technologies like photogrammetry (The technology that makes games like DMC5 and Resident Evil 7 and 8 look as good as they do) it feels kinda pointless to put so much into raw fidelity. And that's not even getting into how high resolution textures and models have been eating into VRAM. 8gb of VRAM, which is the amount the RTX 3070 has, is now barely enough to run some games at high settings nowadays.

[@webx135]

A major limitation of games before used to be the limits of system RAM because a full level needed to fit inside RAM. A rather cool advancement is that with the rise of SSDs, there has been more development done into real-time storage streaming. They have gotten really good at it. But the issue is that it doesn't incentivize small sizes, but fast or no decompression. That is to say, in many cases, large file sizes ARE the optimization. And once the drive is directly accessible, there is no incentive to limit game sizes.

[@sparkthedragon]

we need to really start focusing on optimizing, and maybe slow down and wait for storage to catch up to to prices that are more acceptable, optimization though is really important, i cant explain how many gigabytes typically are taken up just by cut content or oddly high texture objects in places you will never look at too in depthly

[@yomaso1134]

Regarding higher resolution textures as an option, when you try to install Fortnite on Epic Games it immediately asks what things you would like to enable, with some of the options being to install high resolution textures (like 15GB extra for Epic textures option), pre-download streamed assets (downloads skins and stuff to your drive for 10GB extra), option for DX12 shaders (8GB), option for STW content (5GB). By itself Fortnite BR is around 50GB, but with all the extra content it can go up to 85GB or so. And the fact they don't just ask whether you want 16K textures and stuff like pre-downloaded assets is also asked is cool since it is so much less straining on users with poor internet. Well done Epic James.

[@totallynotabot6003]

Wish more games had this

[@happerexanime1471]

You can get all of GameCube, PS1, all console games from before 1995, all 3ds and 2ds games in a PS5 and still have a lot of storage left. But now 1tb is barely enough for 5 AAA games in PS5

[@Treblaine]

One thing that kept file sizes small was hardware with slow memory access while decompression was fast. If the bitrate from storage is slow but you can decompress a file at minimal cost in CPU cycles then you can get any given texture off a disk/SSD quicker if you store it highly compressed which lowers overall file sizes. Faster memory encourages larger file sizes.

[@Zylefer]

At first, I was really confused why Stryxo made this video (as someone studying game development, I know all the technical reasons why games are becoming longer). Then Stryxo pointed out download CAPS, something I completely forgot about, then it all made sense.

[@Wesmoen]

Around 2014 4k textures were an extra option for a slew of games. You had to download them separately. That option was nice to have. Now, it's part of your base download. If your device won't need them, why must as consumer download that. I hope devices like Steam Deck will shake that up again.

[@bryku]

Hmm... for me it depends on the game. For Call of Duty it is such a fast paced game that very few people will notice a difference between 2k and 4k textures. However, for story driven games or open world games I can see why they would put a lot of time and detail into the textures. Players will be exploring and messing around not really doing anything. As a dev that specifically does optimizations... the probablem isn't the graphic quality, but instead the incentive. There is absolutely zero incentive for game companies to pay devs to optimize file size. The game runs and works, why waste time to reduce it?

[@tech_of_steel20official]

Bro Cyberpunk 2077, which has basically the most technologically advanced graphics in the WORLD currently, is still only 60-70 GB, even at launch when it was the buggiest AAA title we had ever seen, it was STILL only 60-70 GB! What's even more absurd is that I can tell the visual downgrade between something like Cyberpunk and MW2, MW3, and Warzone 3. EVEN AT MINIMUM GRAPHICAL SETTINGS. Yet ironically, I get MORE FPS on CYBERPUNK than Warzone 3 at MINIMUM SETTINGS. P.S. Y'know after all that, you'd atleast expect that they put in some cool tiny, minute details like proper destruction of a surface when using explosives, but no.

[@saricubra2867]

The biggest game (in fact games) that i have on my PC is Halo MCC (125GB). A Call of Duty taking more storage space than freaking Halo MCC is just asinine. MCC has over 120 multiplayer maps, i can't count the tons of Forge maps that people make that also take storage space...

[@tech_of_steel20official]

@@saricubra2867 if I could buy the call of duty IP, man would I start to make changes. I also wouldn’t put my employees through crunch once a month for each battlepass

[@RegalRoyalWasTaken]

if your game is bigger than elden ring then it's too big, that's my personal rule

[@anthonygordon9483]

Textures. That is why. Didnt watch the video lmao. Back in the day Polygon Count was a issue, now its strictly Texture Images. The more detailed the textures the higher the size. on top of how big the world is. But its mainly textures. The more photo realistic they get, the more expensive they get as well.

[@Hades1100]

Another issue is files for other languages are stuck on every version of the game instead of being installed via an individual's choice. I bet the majority of the space taken is uncompressed audio files because we're still using .Wav's.

[@Droidman1231]

As someone who works in software development (though not game development) you're right. Optimization can take a long time and takes time away from other things in a limited development cycle. There is even a word we use called "Tech Debt" for essentially stuff we rushed and will go back and fix later but probably never gets fixed. Even if there's time to optimize, performance would probably be prioritized over memory. Like you said I think the whole game dev business model/process is at a breaking point now.

[@ChrisAzure]

I understand that uncompressed files are quicker to load from storage but in 2024 when Direct Storage and BCPack or Kraken compression exist, there's 0 excuse to have a COD larger than 100Gb.

[@MewPurPur]

"give or take a few" Game developer here. When I export the same project to different platforms, I get slightly different sizes. It's likely that.

[@alexale5488]

Because you pack in the SDKs and binaries.

[@TheTiredPhrog]

Mw3 is HALF of my total storage on my ps5, I can't put ps5 games on my external storage either. I'm juggling games and prioritising whichever ones I play most. It shouldn't be like this (I've got 3 games on my console rn)

[@notme8232]

There are brand new SSDs being sold that are literally too small for that game, factoring in Windows overhead.

[@anthonyfernandez82]

Get the old COD games on sale rn instead or something, idk

[@buffsniper]

​@@anthonyfernandez82And play in dead or Hacker filled lobbies....

[@anthonyfernandez82]

Things are going pretty alright for me on consoles. Aside from not being ablw to find a single damn game of infected on most of the games ​@@buffsniper

[@belstar1128]

isn't console gaming fun

[@SupremeVerminAirsoft]

I haven’t worried at all about storage since switching to PC. Went from a 500gb 360 to a pc with close to 45 terabytes to have headroom for raw 4k video clips for edits and game clips. I only see a benefit to consoles when looking at the social media aspect and cost to performance but there’s a cap on peak performance. I can play 99% of PlayStation games on a pc with a ps5 controller while also being able to play every Xbox game, and with emulation I can play essentially any game. A pc can play PS1-PS5 games, if you want to get fancy a single pc can run more than one game at a time all while watching a KZbin video on a second monitor. 🤷🏼‍♂️

[@Joey8809]

Games are like CaseOh now

[@JmKrokY]

4:35 There were 32 bit consoles capable of rendering a 3D world, in fact the original PlayStation was one of them.

[@overdev1993]

the N64 didn't even needed to be 64 bit, 99% of the time the games on that don't even use the 64 bit and when they do it's by accident

[@saricubra2867]

Fake 3D, because of the jittery look.

[@vanillacoldspore]

I think he meant to say 16-bit, as 32-bit games are still pretty common if you play older titles - Spore is a 32-bit game, and also 3D. And until recently, Team Fortress 2 was 32-bit, too.

[@IceFlower22]

9:06 Capitalism. That's why capitalism is literally the reason for all of this, the crunch, the impressively bad games that get churned out every year. It's all about trying to make as much money as possible

[@IngrownMink4]

Facts!

[@comradecatbug5289]

Capitalism kills art and stunts innovation

[@DaakkuuYRS]

That's part why I love my switch so much. When buying physical the games are played right from the card, meaning no installtion on the hard drive. Only the updates take space, but I still have 84 games on switch, can play all of them right away, and never upgraded my Switch storage.

[@Sinbad1999]

For one of my university coursework, I had to make a VR Experience in Unity and what's funny is the project file itself is about 5gb because of all the assets and everything but when i built the project, the entire exe and files and everything took about 400mb xD

[@ARandomUserOfThisWorld]

Oh my god who gave the devs permission to the nasa computer bc ain’t no way running on any other regular pc with less than 500 tb of storage

[@jacobgilbert8070]

We came out with a very good solution to fix this problem decades ago. It’s called playing on PC.

[@insu_na]

There's a few technical reasons for this, too. Lots of games lazy load assets, because GPUs *still* generally only have a very small amount of VRAM. To get an asset from disk to the GPU in its compressed state you first have to load the asset into RAM, since you can't connect the RAM and the SSD/HDD directly, all of that first has to go through the CPU and its caches. Then once it's in RAM the entire set of assets you just loaded have to be decompressed, so they get loaded back into the CPU piece by piece for decompression and then loaded back into RAM in the uncompressed state. Since compression algorithms generally need to compress large blocks of data for the highest efficiency you're actually having to decompress quite a bit more data than the data you need/want. Either way once the asset you need is fully decompressed you can load it into VRAM, so back through the CPU and into the PCIe bus the uncompressed asset goes. If you store your assets in an uncompressed format however you can either use this fancy new DirectStorage tech where you connect the GPU directly to the SSD and let it grab the uncompressed asset it needs directly, without the CPU ever even knowing that something happened, or if you don't have DirectStorage you can load the data from the SSD into the CPU and from there directly into VRAM, either of which will be much faster than decompressing the data. There have been attempts made to get GPUs to do the asset decompression, but that has not been mega successful so far, but we'll see how it develops.