Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes?
Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes?
Do all the latest big budget games require over 100 GB of drive space? What's the average size of a AAA game today? We've investigated the figures...
Meanwhile, Deep Rock Galactic: solid mechanics, good community, worth so many hours of fun, no microtransactions, no FOMO for their season rewards, and stylized low poly graphics that make every cave gorgeous to look at: 3gb and only $30
I don't understand what happened with this game...
My bothers and I played it quite early on and it was fine. We didn't stick with it or anything. Just another spot to play together. No one was talking about it or anything.
Then like a year later everyone is going nuts about it. We see it pop-up everywhere.
It's a game that gets quite repetitive. And I say that as someone who has played it regularly since Early Access.
I play it, have tons of fun until it's all the same again and again, I forget about it, devs release new free stuff, I try the new stuff... repeat. I can see some people giving up on the game for good but it's a game best played occasionally.
Oh, and the online community is surprisingly friendly and non-toxic for the most part.
It was free on some services, might have boosted engagement
For me I got into it because I wanted a game that bridged mine and a friend's interests. I like mining things and she likes shooting things. So I'm driller main she's gunner main and it works great. I've stuck with it and been so excited for it because the devs are phenomenal. They work with the community, don't try and screw us every chance they get, the game is just fun and the devs seem like they have fun too. It is so refreshing having a game that isn't hot garbage. I also actually really like multiplayer sometimes but almost always that means dealing with hordes of super toxic players. That just doesn't happen with DRG almost everyone is so friendly and most people who see me doing absolute nonsense join in on it instead of telling me to play better. I tell everyone about DRG because of how rare it is to find a game with good devs and good multiplayer.
It's the rock.
You made me go check it out after reading this comment and I'm definitely buying it after I finish some games I need to complete first. Looks awesome!
Hey if you want to hit me up when you try it I'll show you the ropes. Be warned though I play driller almost exclusively and am basically a semi-sentient warcrime
Have you got it to work on Linux?
It plays great on Linux.
Without reading the article:
- High resolution textures
- large maps
- audio
- Internet cache
- shaders
- code left for debugging and data collection
All of those are in good faith. A part of it is in bad faith as well though. Studios forgoing or at least deprioritizing optimalisation. Why waste weeks on Q&A when you can just yawn and tell consumers to upgrade if it doesn't affect your bottom line?
Case in point: COD MWIII All of the internet is (rightly) shitting on it but Activision won't care because they'll likely still sell several million copies. What incentive does that give them to NOT fire entire Q&A departments and pocket those cost savings on top of the profits?
If the game is huge enough no one will have space to play anything else...
QA what? You can't QA and optimise huge ass textures to fit into a gig. I can tell you a story about high res images. My partner is a photographer. She did a commissioned project of 7 collage photos to be printed in large scale. She bought a 512 gig drive to work on a project. These 7 photos took 95% of the space of this drive in the end. Yeah, 500 gigs for 7 bloody photos!
With reading the article:
- console discs have 60 GB of space, might as well export your assets at a quality which fills it
Your sight-unseen summary is far too detailed in comparison.
And readily available resources. No need to put effort into space saving tricks when space is so easy to come by
Plus downloadability. If you don't plan to play a game for a while, you can delete it and free up space, and have the ability to download it later.
Plus, expandable storage. If a player wants more space, I think that everything out there today is expandable, even consoles, without replacing existing storage. If, say, 10% of the player base wants to keep a larger library downloaded than their console's internal storage can handle, and the base console doesn't have enough space, they can just throw another USB drive on the system.
I guess maybe for portable devices, it could be obnoxious to carry the storage around.
Gamers: "we want photorealistic 3D graphics in 4K resolution!"
Also gamers: "why do games take up so much space these days?"
In the case of call of duty, they want no other games on your hard drive. 🤣
I actually wonder if that's legitimately their goal.
It might not be their goal because large files have performance ramifications, but if they can they save on cpu by taking space.
Plus they know their players don't play their entire catalog and stick to specific franchises because games are so fucking expensive, so now they make you have to gamble if you're going to buy this other game an wipe your console to just stick with what's installed. For live service games this is definitely profitable.
And why are GPUs shipped with so little VRAM?!
Isn't it funny how Nvidia wants you to use upscaling so badly for Raytracing to perform as well as they market it to, but then Raytracing itself needs more VRAM to run properly in the first place?
Nothing about their products makes any technical sense anymore, it really is just one giant middle finger at this point
The only thing that makes less sense is their price tag.
Pretty much.
Because Nvidia made it a premium feature
I mean, vram IS expensive. Though what nvidia did was charge for cards that should've had more RAM and pocketed the difference... scummy shitheads.
Online services like games consoles and the likes of Steam / Epic should really allow games to be bundled such that users can choose to only install the "recommended" content rather than everything - the textures for their display & graphics card and multimedia and other assets for their region & localization. If a game is level based they could even grab it the first time it is used, rather than all up front. I bet in a lot of cases it would shave 30% off the download size.
Another source of bloat would be duplicate content - a hold over from hard disks where the cost of seeking an asset meant game data files would hold duplicates of assets wherever they were needed to load-in which increases bloat. In the days of SSDs, that should no longer be necessary but I bet a lot of games still do it anyway. Publishers just need to decide if they're going to support HDDs or not and if the answer is not, then stop bloating games for no reason.