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Why do modern games have such large file sizes?
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Various things:
I would also say it could be a problem of art direction, having no constraint and ignoring smart techniques that use less data.
Also, a higher-budget –> more preorders?
More data –> more game?
For a very simple element, consider that if you used to have texture resolutions of 256² = 65536 pixels, you now might easily have 4096² = ~16.7mil pixels, a 25480% increase.
So our 4k texture packs really guzzle up harddrive space. And that’s ignoring how many many many more things there are to texture in the first place, how each element has multiple textures overlaid for shading, and all the other parts also needing more space like higher-def audio.
I figured it had to be something like 4k texture packs. I have a Steam Deck and don’t generally play anything at high res even when connected to a monitor. There ought to be a way to say hey limit the install to the res I’ll actually be using?
Far from standard, but some games on Steam offer their HD textures as a free DLC. Then you could choose not to install it. Way back when games still came on disks and DRM wasn’t so invasive you could also mod games and replace the HD textures with lower res, but I don’t think that is possible with today’s game engines. If it weren’t outright an option during the installation.
I remember when Shadow of Mordor released and they added the 4k dlc. I think that the dlc alone took up as much space, if not more than the whole game did without it.
Iirc it was about 60GB or something, might have been smaller as it’s an old game, but still huge.
Lack of optimization, and crazy texture packs
Audio is another big one. If you want good quality music and your game is voice acted you would be surprised how much space all those audio files take. Add in tons of other gigabytes if you offer voice acting for other languages.
evidently a lot of games dont compress their audio files at all, so a ton of data is wasted on that by itself. theres really no excuse for that because there are plenty of lossless compression algorithms and compressed files will often have faster loading times because the disk read speed is the limiting factor even with the added computational cost of the decompression. thats also true for all the other game files such as textures and meshes and whatnot, which are often also uncompressed.
Why is it uncompressed? For speed? Is it written such that the data does not need to be serialized into RAM?
They optimized for things other than install size. Optimization is often choosing one thing at the expense of others.
they optimized for least effort.
Pray tell, how do you think “they” should optimize game assets? People who have zero experience in game development love to talk about “optimization” like it’s a slider in the options or some challenge that can be solved by throwing resources at it. Modern compression algorithms like Oodle are about as performant and artifact-free as mathematically possible. Everything beyond that is a trade-off between quality, size, and performance.
But are you thinking about it in abstract? Would you prefer a game to have occasional pop-in, stutter issues, and CPU spikes in exchange for a smaller size?
(edit) Before you say it, I know there are relatively low-fidelity games that run like ass. Those are usually caused by poorly written game logic or shader codes, which can be refactored, but won’t have an effect on file sizes.
Hey, listen to OP and turn your file compression spider up at least 50%
I remember jak and daxter being amazing because they optimized to not have loading screens (unless you teleported). First time I remember that in a 3d game
edit: it stays :3
Do you need to take any precautions around the file compression spider?
just don’t leave any important paperwork around it or you’ll have to go hunting for it on the web.
When time is money, optimizing for time is a worthwhile endeavor. 6+ year dev cycles aren’t something anyone wants. But realistically, large file sizes probably aren’t going away with more dev time.
6+ years dev cycles is something I am comfortable with, because I want something done well, and if it’s something big enough (like Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate), then of course it will take a long time, even with big
commandteamBut I still haven’t figured out another end of such a deal: how to keep all the
commandteam members alive, fed and comfortable for this long time? Buying a game once, even multiplied by whatever-count-of-copies-they-have-sold-for-now, doesn’t give a guarantee that all those people have enough money to just keep creating something exciting for as long as it takesAnd a huge number of art assets in general. These days in the AAA industry the artists work much faster than the designers and programmers, so by the time the designers and programmers have finished their part, the art team has had time to make 3-4 times as many assets as they really need.
Storage and computing power was pretty cheap until recently, so it’s just “wasted” time and money to optimize games. I think in the coming years games will be optimized more since everything is becoming so expensive.
I admire your optimism. I hope it is so.
Bruh it’s literally how tech advances….
When resources (compute power) is cheap, there’s huge leaps in tech. When resources are scarce, the fat gets trimmed.
It’s not optimism, it’s pattern recognition.
when have we seen gaming resources become more scarce?
Back in the nineties, I advocated for “build on the most powerful system, test and improve on the least”.
I think it’s still relevant.
The idea of course is as developers, we need the best equipment to make the work bearable and more efficient, but the users rarely have that luxury. Make it work well on the least powerful reasonably representative equipment.
It’s easy to think your work is done on the dev box, but have a disaster in the real world.
Cheap storage and RAM availability (until recently) meant that developers could sacrifice space and minimize the amount of compression on assets.
Decompressing files require processing, and if you can avoid that, then you free up some computer resources.
Modern games are typically large and have a lot of assets & textures. And these textures are high resolution (4096x4096 typically) and the downscaled versions are also stored.
Also, lack of optimization.
Texture file size tells nothing about the resolution, or quality. You can make a game with a single 4096x4096 texture, which contains the terrain, soldiers, vehicles, skybox, etc… and you can do a single decal in game with 4k texture.
Ive used single 4096x4096 texure 14 years ago for my locomotive DLC’s external model, to optimize drawcall count. And another 4096 for the interior model
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Probably do something stupid like individual bit fields for every possibility instead of a bit string. Or having it i a json wrapper for every single variable and combination, without any compression.
Thoguh save states in general grow more complicated as games become more complicated too. Think about early games, all you needed to track was… what level you were on, number of lives, and maybe a list of weapons.
Now you need things like the time of day in game, the weather, what interactions with other npcs you’ve had, multiple stats on every character in your party including customized outfits and accessories, etc. and just like the games themselves, they’re probably not using pointers but actual data too sometimes, which sucks.
Crusader Kings III saves are insane. There’s like 50,000 characters and each one is unique. Appearance, age, weight, health, sexual preference, fertility, culture, religion, skills, traits, money, family/relationships, holdings, probably more that I’m forgetting.
And that’s just the characters. There’s also over 10,000 locations on the map with their own buildings, culture, faith, etc.
I think BG3 saves remember things like the position of every item you’ve ever left on the floor, because the entire world seems persistent. Which is cool, but it’s also a game where I have hundreds of saves. Maybe I should also check my save file size, come to think of it.
It wasn’t until I tried running a Pokémon game in an emulator that I realized how small a save file can be. They’re in the kilobytes range, even though they have to store all game play and achievements, inventory, every Pokémon you’ve ever captured with full stats and even those you’ve only seen, etc. It must be some binary format with absolutely no fat in it.
As others have said, it’s mostly audio and textures, with some of it being the choice of engine. Lossless CD quality audio and ultra high resolution textures and bump maps for a jillion triangle models take up a lot of space. The actual executables are relatively small, though certainly the layers and layers of frameworks that make up modern software development are somewhat to blame.
So it sounds like its an exchange of size for customizability.
If you had a different installer for each language and/or video quality, then each installation could be much smaller. But since we (gamers) want to be able to change texture quality “on the fly” via the settings menu, we have to deal with all the possible textures coming in the game files.
Does that sound like I have it right?
That is definitely part of it, but there’s also just plain more textures and models because people complain if they see the same texture or models reused a lot, or the textures look too grainy when they are right up next to one. An uncompressed 256x256 RGBA texture takes 256 kilobytes to store. A 4k version takes 16 megabytes.
It’s not Steam games, it’s AAA games.
Save cost on optimization. Increase the demand for storage. Manufacture the need for data centers. Profit. Why make a product ready for you when they can sell you a problem and a solution along with it?
Indie games on Steam tend to be a few GBs at most.
AAA do not manufacture demand for storage, that’s frankly ridiculous.
This is a simple issue of optimization:
A: noone cares to optimise the size when performance is a much bigger issue.
B: games are still often optimised for HDDs on consoles (duplicated assets), then ported to PC with as little effort as possible
Try to run any 3d modelling software and create something trivial, like a textured cube. Measure the size.
Equal parts textures and arranging duplicate data next to each other for fast streaming
The duplicate data isn’t necessary anymore when installed on SSDs but a bunch of games still have it.
Helldivers 2 on PC as an example went from a bloated 150+ GB install down to less than 40 GB at some point when they found out that the duplication both wasn’t helpful for the vast majority of PC players and it didn’t have the impact it used to. Now it is comparable to the console install, which was always smaller.
4K textures are a scam. With upscaling, even the people who run games in 4K don’t use the 4K textures.
I don’t think you know what the word scam means
Historically fames have had to be shipped on storage devices and storage was very heavy until late 80s ish so optimise to get your stuff small. These days you can download 100 gig in hours so they don’t bother. Look up old drives they’re huge.
Well yes, but for some of us the ‘in hours’ is more than 24-hours worth of hours. Longer in reality, because it’s shared internet.
It costs time and money to make them smaller, big studios dont want to waste that and know their games will sell regardless.
It’s like the Trojan war. A gifted horse has lots of other shit inside that you don’t know about.
I’ve seen a couple games that have the high res textures as a free separate download. That’d be nice. I’m not playing in 4k so I don’t need all that extra crap.
You can bypass it by not buying such large games. Plenty of good games under 5GB come out all the time.
I had some amazing deck builders come in at less than 1GB.
I’d say this year’s best game so far, that I’ve played anyway, is only 2.13 GB; Escape from Ever After.
As an aside, I don’t think you actually have fast internet - or whatever you are downloading doesn’t have any mirrors even remotely close to you.
Assuming the GB is Gibibytes (worst case scenario), that is 730,144 Megabits (not bytes). With a 100 Megabit connection (lower end of what most ISPs offer that I’ve seen and still call it “high-speed") that should be done in about 2 hours. In 8 hours at 100 Mb speed you should be able to download over 300 Gigs of data.
85GB in 8-12 hours is somewhere between 17 and 25 Mbps, which would be stressed out by 1080p video streaming.
What ticks me off about modern AAA games, and the “texture size” reason for large file size being mentioned in these comments, is just how misguided the effort is.
If your game is running in UE5 (as many modern AAA titles are), it probably has forced TAA and a bunch of other unoptimized garbage. With the TAA and misc frame interpolation nonsense you inevitably get smearing and weird shadows.
Who cares if you can make out individual hairs on a character whose hand just smear melded into the background for a few seconds? None of those fine textures are visible through the motion blur and bloom lighting and post-processing filters anyway. It’s absurd.
I’ve been playing The Talos Principle: Reawakening recently, which is a 2025 remake of the 2014 game, fresh with all of the UE5 bells and whistles. The old game looked pretty good, despite being made by a smaller team. It was a bit austere, but that fit with the theme and setting of the game. The new version looks objectively worse to me. Sure it has raytracing, but everything is a little blurry now even if you tweak the settings. As someone who loathes TAA I also can’t help but noting the smearing. In a game where noticing the details is important to solving the puzzles, focusing quickly on things matters. Sometimes I don’t even see an important laser connector tool until my third time in an area. Also, since it’s unoptimized as is par for the course, my 4090 isn’t enough to fight the frame dips down for a stuttery 30 fps in certain areas.
I’m sure there’s games where the larger textures have an impact, but if you’re burying them under several layers of blurry filters, I don’t see the point.
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No, Call of duty doesn’t even store all of its full res textures on your hard drive lol. They could make it much bigger if they wanted to
I don’t follow this logic. Could you expand on it?
They likely mean that if a game is just a few GB in size, people won’t think twice about uninstalling it since they can just quickly download it again if needed.
By making the download bigger and so the installation time longer, it disincentivizes players to do that.
Gotcha, I hadn’t considered that angle. When I’m in need of space, the largest one I’m not really playing is usually the first to go (e.g. Helldivers). Then once or is uninstalled, the large size is my disincentive to install it again.
What makes an install sticky for me is something like mods or customizations that I would have to set up again after a reinstall… which are much more prevalent in single player offline games than monetized live service chum.
It’s flawed
Devs don’t compress textures because it’s slower and that’s what kids care about.
It’s not about time to install, it’s shaving off every microsecond of loading time.
That’s… not a very fast connection. 85 gb in 8 hours is about 25 Mbps, streaming 4k is only about 15-25, so maybe 50 Mbps total? The cheapest tier offered in my area is 100 Mbps. Gigabit is quickly becoming the standard.
But it’s always “up to” those speeds, at least where I’m at. I pay for gigabit but I’d say I probably average half that, depending on what time of day. The way they’re allowed to advertise speeds is such a scam.
Sure, but if OP had gigabit and it maxed out at 500 Mbps, that 85 GB download would take 25 minutes. Mid tier is advertised as 500, so assuming an average of 250, that’s still less than an hour while streaming in 4k.