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.
I don’t really think that I have a range that’s anywhere near that narrow.
First, some of my favorite games are roguelikes (e.g. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or Caves of Qud), and they often have very few assets, which is where all the data in larger games comes from.
It looks like the largest release of Cataclysm (the one with the graphics and sounds) unpacks to be 586MB. Caves of Qud — actually, I’m surprised that it’s this large — has a 1.4GB directory in Steam after installation.
I have a hard time imagining a lower bound (short of maybe demoscene type stuff, where I’d be surprised that stuff could fit into so little space). But I have a hard time imagining avoiding a game because it’s too small.
Second, I don’t think that there are any commercial games out there that are going to cause me to not play them due to storage space. Starfield is probably the largest I’ve done, and while it uses enough disk space that I’m not going to leave it installed if I don’t plan to play it anytime soon, it’s not an issue to store it.
https://twinfinite.net/features/biggest-games-all-time-ranked-install-size/
This says that Starfield has a 125 GB install.
The largest that they have listed there is ARK: Survival Evolved , at 435 GB. That does seem a little excessive to me, but, I mean, you can get a 4TB NVMe drive on Amazon right now for ( checks ) ~$200, so that’s really $25 in storage, and when you’re not playing it, you can just uninstall it and put something else there. As gaming hardware goes, $25 just isn’t that big a deal.
In theory, I could imagine some sort of game that procedurally-generates a dynamic world as one explores that has massive save files or something, something in the vein of Minecraft-style games. Disk space there could be theoretically unbounded. So you could design a hypothetical game that I’d object to. But…I don’t really think that there’s really a practical limitation that excludes games for me today today.
I see you’ve never played an indie game. 60 gb? That’s like 50 game installs right there.
Some of my favs I consider indie went well over that 60GB mark. If you agree on swedes from FatShark being indie, I can explain their funny fuckery, probably in a separate post.
Internet speeds are kind of irrelevant to me. I can download and install Helldivers 2 in the space of 15 minutes. So speed is irrelevant. Space, also kind of irrelevant but not nearly as much. Most of my space is dominated by memes, I wonder why. However, nonetheless, 20 gigs. It pisses me off when I see anything that goes above 50 or 70, and I don’t know if that’s just from playing on console for years or what, but it drives me absolutely fucking insane.
I hope at one point, big game devs optimize their game sizes. If I’m correct, a big chunk of modern game sizes (this big ones) are 4k textures and similar items that 90% of people dont need, why haven’t these been deparated from the core game as free DLC?
Anything bigger than 50gb makes me quite upset.
.kkrieger is damn cool, it is a full 3D FPS that only takes up less than 100 kilobytes.
The game was released in the demoscene back in 2004.
I have played it, it is damn impressive feom a technical point of view, but it isn’t very fun as a game. Visually it is stunning when you consider the size and the tech at the time, it looks quite atmospheric with bloom and impressive textures.
Nostalgia Nerd made a video about it:
40-70 GBs is the sweet spot for me. My Wi-Fi can download it within a day usually and I can fit a bunch of them onto my 1 TB SSD
1 GB is very good, 10 GB is good, 30 GB is okay, 60 GB is very big.
Warranted or usefulness depends on the game.
I would prefer titles like battlefield offering downloading or dropping only singleplayer and multiplayer.
Guild Wars 1 offered streaming on demand, or predownloading all data. It was possible back then, and would be possible today.
For me on guild wars 1 I just downloaded the thing. Didn’t realize it could be streamed.
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I went to install Knights of the Old Republic last night, it’s on sale for $3.00 on steam. Misclicked on Star Wars: The Old Republic, and had a moment of shock when the install size was over 50 gig. Then I realized my error. 3 gigs is much more understandable.
Maybe I should do a let’s play. I’ve never played the game and have managed to avoid most spoilers…
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.Anything more than 100 GB Feels like the devs just want to take space on my drive so I don’t play anything else
This
I see a game more than a 1.5 gigs, I start having second thoughts. I only play indie games, though.
10GB max otherwise I’m not going to keep it installed
I tend towards games that are on the small end, less than 20Gb in general. That covers almost all of my favourites that I have put more than 100 hours into. Some that I have out over 1000 hours into are under 1Gb and are still very intense. That said, if I got a new game which was supposed to look good I would be happy with 70Gb, but more than that feels like lazy studios churning our high res textures to cover up bad design. You can absolutely reuse textures in creative ways to drop the scale of your storage requirements. If you really need massive assets for your top graphics tier then make multiple versions of the assets and allow a smaller install. I don’t need games that are in the Tb range.
40-50GB is enough for a 1080P game.
If you want 2/4K textures, add a free DLC to the store page like Fallout 4 did.
