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 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 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.
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.
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 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…
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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.I am somewhat stuck in the past. ~7mbps internet on a good day, (fast) storage is not unlimited, computer is 2019 sale parts except still using 2016 budget GPU (1050Ti).
100MiB or under: it’s free real-estate
600MiB: I can tolerate this as an average size
2GiB: common AA size, function and quality better match
15GiB+: this is probably not worth it, beyond eye-candy maybe
60GiB+: This is diminishing returns, and likely multiple technical (and arguably better) choices could have avoided such bloat.
More understandable with physical media, though my last console did not age gracefully (YLoD, another unit I got via barter runs but probably has dry thermal paste). Also I mostly play free (and/or older) games these days.
Also personally: polygons are often enough. See Spyro’s vertex color skyboxes:
still using 2016 budget GPU (1050Ti).
Check out the Intel b580, your 2019 hardware should support rebar. (An bios update might be required). It’s a phenomenal upgrade for around $250US
But I feel you on the bandwidth issue. I’ve had to give up on some games that frequently update.
your 2019 hardware should support rebar
Arc seems to take issue with low bandwidth even with rebar on (I suspect an architecture/pipeline issue), both because PCIe3.0 and older CPUs (less IPC/frequency?).
Oh interesting, I’ll need to look into that more.
I’d expect that it’s much better than a 1050. And still probably best in slot at that price point. (For new hardware)
Perhaps a used 1080ti would be better but I doubt a system with a 1050 has the power supply for that.
I doubt a system with a 1050 has the power supply for that
Remember that was an outlier for the build. PSU is 650w silver. Though it’s currently nice to not need a GPU power cable.
I’m mostly happy with 1050Ti performance level for what I do. Probably will just stick with it unless I could get used AMD (for better time on Linux), like an 8GiB Polaris card for a moderate uplift. Probably not considering I don’t know anyone and don’t feel like buying used online.
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.
10GB max otherwise I’m not going to keep it installed
