Massive File Size Hate Thread

When did developers start doing this?

  • The game was rigged from the start.

    Votes: 22 19.3%
  • 1990s

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • 2000s

    Votes: 4 3.5%
  • 2010s

    Votes: 76 66.7%
  • 2020s

    Votes: 11 9.6%

  • Total voters
    114
Every Call of Duty release ranges from 150-300 gb.
I was going to reinstall MW2019, but that's 75GB from the disc. Even with Warzone 1.0 going away, the file size with CoD is massively bloated. Most of that is multiplayer content with uncompressed textures and unoptimized assets between titles. It's not uncommon for a CoD release now to be in the triple digits in storage space for ONE title or ONE mode. Ridiculous.
 
What happened?
Broadband internet and web-based distribution happened, so there's no reason to have to cut down the file size of your game.

I think the main reasons for the bloat are increased texture sizes and uncompressed 4k video files for every cutscene, in every language. If you could select a la carte shit you want included in your install of the game you could probably cut the download size in half easy
 
To be fair this has always been an issue. I was furious at the inconvenience when games needed 4 or more CD-ROMs to install everything. In the days of 25 GB HDDs that was not an insignificant amount of space. Installation also took fucking forever and if the slightest thing went wrong your computer could freeze up and the install would be broken meaning you had to start again.

There did seem to be a massive spike in game file size when the PS4 came out, though.
 
Singleplayer only Grand Theft Auto V is 122 gb.
Unmodded Fallout 4 is 90 gb.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is 150 gb.
Cyberpunk 2077 is 150 gb.
Spider-Man is 80 gb.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is 120 gb, a sequel 12x bigger than the original.
Every Call of Duty release ranges from 150-300 gb.
Forza Horizon 5 released at 175 gb.
It’s good that I don’t like any of these anyway.
In my view no game worth playing is ever a grotesque file size, so it is a surefire way of checking if you should invest time into it.
This does seem to ring pretty true these days. Old games are the best games to invest time in and their file sizes are tiny.
 
Better graphics means higher-res textures and effects maps and fewer repeated maps. That blows up game size. Diablo IV's 4K-friendly textures add 65 GB to the installation size, for example.
 
Uncompressed audio files are also to blame. We’ve reached the point in the “improvement” of audio quality where the difference is literally outside the range of human perception and yet it takes up tons more storage space than it used to. For games in which every line of dialogue is voice acted in multiple languages, this adds up insanely fast.
I remember like a decade ago downloading the Japanese dub dlc for darkengaurd 3 and it was a 1/15th of the whole games file size and that just the voices who know how much the all the music and sound effect take up. Still that was the ps3 when you where at least expected to have the full game in the disc so god know how bad it is now...well actual we do know since we can just look at the files I'm just to lazy to look it up right now.
 
Large file size is a psyop designed to instill a feeling of sunk cost fallacy - the game weighs so much you wouldn't want to uninstall it for other games.
I feel like this is a double edged sword because I was one of those people who used to buy CoD semi regularly, but once the games started getting so fucking enormous, I just called it quits. Like, I wouldn't mind playing Black Ops Cold War, but I'm not having that thing take up a chunk of my HDD just because they can't be assed to compress that shit down.
 
tldr massive file size is justified by high-res textures and audio but nobody can even be bothered to do a lazy lz4 pass and deduplication can help on top of that
Soydeveloped games are already choking on modern hardware even when NOT having to decompress assets in the background.
 
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Uncompressed audio files are also to blame. We’ve reached the point in the “improvement” of audio quality where the difference is literally outside the range of human perception and yet it takes up tons more storage space than it used to. For games in which every line of dialogue is voice acted in multiple languages, this adds up insanely fast.
There's a possibility to turn back the clock with procedural generation, AI textures, AI text-to-speech, LLMs, etc. AAA studios won't care about shrinking their games below 100 GB, but at some point it becomes impossible to record as much dialogue as you would want for a 16x larger open world game. So they will do some limited recording with VAs or license voice patterns from a company like Replica Studios. If the game engine can generate the voices in real time or close to it, only the text and markup need to be stored. LLMs can take it a step further by removing the need to write most lines, and allowing the player to type (or speak) directly to NPCs with a written backstory and other contextual information.

On the storage front, 4 TB SSDs are dropping to nearly $200 again, 8 TB is becoming more prevalent, and 16 TB single-sided M.2 2280 SSDs should be feasible within a couple of years.
 
Man i sure cant wait for terabyte sized games. What the hell would they even have to make themselves so big I wonder?

Probably just very long else, if chains. If compression techniques have gone the way of the dodo why not optimized code all together? Yandere dev is secretly a pioneer!
 
Soydeveloped games are already choking on modern hardware even when NOT having to decompress assets in the background.
retard alert

lz4 decompresses at double digit GB/s on a single core

lz4 compression tends to INCREASE r/w performance because the CPU is faster than the storage medium for this type of compression, even NVMe.
 
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What happened?

Nobody likes this and it needs to stop. Skyrim was 4 gb at release. Even Special Edition is about 20 gb.
Others covered high res textures, uncompressed audio, audio in multiple languages, useless engine features, high speed internet, lack of disc space limitations due to consoles coming with hard drives now.

One I've not seen mentioned, and I expect this to be an unpopular opinion. YouTube and comments sections. In the same way AAA devs were found to be using DSP as the measure of an "average" player and thus dumbed games down, glitch YouTubers like Crowbcat and pixel counters like Digital Foundry are part of the problem. It's easy to zoom in using a sniper rifle, and say how the game sucks because "the texture on this crisp packet in a gutter you zoom past in at 100mph while buildings explode around you isn't true 4k! Lazy devs! -8000/10".
 
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I still remember the days when 5-7 GB was "really large" for a game.
Personally I just avoid slop.
Of all the games I still play, 0 cross the 50 GB mark and only 3 cross the 10 GB mark.
 
I don't even own a ninth generation console but I still happen to know many people who do, and they cannot download more than 25% of their purchased library. I don't even remember owning a game with more than 50 GB. Most of them games happen to be boring, unimaginative or straight out way too easy to the point of absurdity.
 
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