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.
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.
To predownload everything, you had to run it with a
-imagelaunch parameter. So if you “just downloaded the thing”, you probably used the normal streaming approach of it downloading stuff on demand.
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.
I don’t play much multiplayer anymore so bigger installs don’t stick around long enough to annoy me. Now, I do wish we had a drop down menu to select different quality packages and language packs from Steam or whatever client. Space waste sometimes. I can’t afford enough VRAM for some of these games to max out texture resolution, and I don’t need every language or redundant c++ / .net redist packages.
It’s pretty minor complaint for me it’s just a longer download.
I see a game more than a 1.5 gigs, I start having second thoughts. I only play indie games, though.
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.
I stopped buying new games when physical discs went the way of the Dodo. I have plenty of older games that would keep me entertained till I die (I think I won’t even get to finish most of them), so I don’t have a direct stake in this discussion.
Just wanted to say it amazes me when I read here how big games have gotten. I still sometimes get surprised at Word documents that wouldn’t fit on a floppy anymore. And I remember running Civ 2 from an external Zip disc because I didn’t have the space on my HDD ( the game came on a single CD). It was a bitch waiting for the advisors to load from what was essentially a 100MB floppy connected through a parallel port. But I digress. The point is, anything that wouldn’t fit on a DVD is absolutely unfathomable for me, and you people are talking about 100GB+ games here…
What games do you like.?
Anything that doesn’t require hand-eye coordination. This is not due to age; I just always sucked at that. So, turn-based strategies (Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Panzer General) and RPGs with turn-based combat (Might and Magic, Wizardry, SSI Gold and Silver Box games), or the combination of both genres (UFO: Enemy Unknown, Jagged Alliance). Come think of, none of those should require a lot of HDD space anyway.
Very cool! I missed the boat on HoMM3 but there is a new game out called Songs of Silence that is a similar vibe and I love it.
I’m running things on a 500GB SSD drive so anything north of 100GB is a hard sell. I’m also on low-mid specs so it’s generally not much of an issue. The games I play mostly fall in the 0-5GB category but I do play the occasional 20-50GB.
One of the biggest games I’ve played on my PC is Red Dead Redemption 2 at 120GB.
10GB max otherwise I’m not going to keep it installed
My issue is more because of bandwidth than storage, anything over 20gb means I’m not downloading it at home unless I super super super want to play the game, because at 20gb that’s probably an all day long download and will fuck my net for the day
Honestly, this is one of the best arguments for repackers. Why use a 20GB download when a repacker can fit it into 10 or 15GB instead?
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.
It’s not something I’ve ever considered, honestly. My only criteria is ‘do I want to play this game?’ That said, the only games I’ve said ‘yes’ to that question lately with large download sizes are the Doom games, and some racing simulators.
.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
