In years prior there were a lot of games and a shifting understanding of what hardware they can require. While gfx needs changed rapidly, hard drive space requirements went up steadily, predictably. As most of us have long abandoned physical media sales and use digital downloads instead, this number has stopped to be defined by the medium’s capacity.
Before and now we had outliers like MMORPGs and movie-like games requiring more estate, while other games like Deep Rock Galactic needing just 4GBs, but there always was some number of gigabytes you as a consumer thought a new game would take.
Where’s that sweet spot now for you?
For me, it’s 60GB, or a 40-80GB range. Something less or more than that causes questions and assumptions. I have a lot of space, but I’d probably decline if some game would exceed 2x of my norm or 120GB of storage.
About a year ago I got a high-speed (so-called “gaming”) hard drive on sale for about 100 USD. It has 8TB, so I kinda stopped uninstalling games or worrying about file sizes.
I don’t really play any games that have more than 80GB file size anyway, but I imagine at around 90-100 is when I’d start being reluctant to download.
As for what I prefer, I feel like smaller file sizes usually yield better games on average. If I find a game that has 100MB download, I’m already lookin like this: 😏
I’m pretty happy with anything up to 10GB. If the original Dark Souls (my favorite game) is 8GB, surely that’s within an order of magnitude of the maximum file size a game can reasonably be, for me at least.