Insane disc space required by AAA games

[secretkeeper12]

Last Thursday, I was booting up Steam to play some TF2 when I happened to notice the news that CoD:AW would be free for the upcoming weekend.

"Oh goody!" thought I. "A chance to diversify my FPS palette!"

So I went to the game's store page, began the install, and continued content with myself when I noticed the space required.

36.5GB.

37,200MB.

Far more than my measly connection could ever hope to download. I can barely handle The Binding of Issac, much less this!

At my ~100kb/second, it would take over a day to install the files. It took about 12 hours for me to get TF2, and that's only 7.3GB.

*sigh*

What tales of woe can you share regarding bandwith?

 

[Exius Xavarus]

I've had the chance to get many games, on my PlayStation 3, but couldn't get them because they were too large for me to get. I have a shitellite internet with a 10GB data limit and 10GB bonus data limit. I recently got a voucher for a free game when I got my PlayStation 4. Either NBA 2K15, Far Cry 4 or Little Big Planet 3. Unfortunately, all three of them are far too large for me to download. Far Cry 4 would take me more than two month's worth of bonus data(I live with other people so I can't use the regular data as I willynilly please) to download.

Not that it really matters, to be honest. PSN went down last Sunday and it's still down, insofar as I'm concerned.

 

[Barbas]

Shadow Of Mordor took about 36.6GB of hard drive space for me. Far Cry 4 apparently asks for about 30GB.

Those are mad. I'd easily have to leave the computer on overnight and most of the morning to download something like that. These companies probably won't be seeing a lot of digital sales in this country in the future if this is going to be the norm.

Speeds here have gotten better over the years, though, I can't deny.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

Less download time for me and more actual space on my hard drive. My laptop has 1.5 tb but is split among 4 internal drives so size is important to me for that matter. So when a game requires 20 - 30 - 50 - whatever gigs I am wary unless it is worth it and the game type justifies it. I passed on Wolfenstein New Order because 50 gigs for a level based shooter, Fuck You, when GTAV comes to pc, the fact that its a an open world game justifies what ever large size it has.

MMOs, large RPG's, and open world games get 50 gigs, not a level based shooter, Or a COD game in the OP's case.

 

[CommanderZx2]

Less download time for me and more actual space on my hard drive. My laptop has 1.5 tb but is split among 4 internal drives so size is important to me for that matter. So when a game requires 20 - 30 - 50 - whatever gigs I am wary unless it is worth it and the game type justifies it. I passed on Wolfenstein New Order because 50 gigs for a level based shooter, Fuck You, when GTAV comes to pc, the fact that its a an open world game justifies what ever large size it has.

MMOs, large RPG's, and open world games get 50 gigs, not a level based shooter, Or a COD game in the OP's case.

Why would you pass on a great game over the installation size? You can easily pick up another TB HDD online for about $50. Games will continue to grow in size as they get larger and more content is required with greater sound and image files needed.

 

[mad825]

more content is required with greater sound and image files needed.

You mean like uncompressed data? Okay. Thank you, like we need it anyway.

 

[CommanderZx2]

more content is required with greater sound and image files needed.

You mean like uncompressed data? Okay. Thank you, like we need it anyway.

Uncompressed data results in faster load times and better quality audio and visuals. I could not imagine why anyone would purposely want lower quality sound and textures in their games.

 

[mad825]

Uncompressed data results in faster load times

It's marginal.

better quality audio and visuals.

again, also marginal. You would need two screenshots to tell the difference if done right.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

Uncompressed data results in faster load times

It's marginal.

better quality audio and visuals.

again, also marginal. You would need two screenshots to tell the difference if done right.

Exactly why I passed on Wolf New Order. The result of the size is marginal, and since I play on an Asus laptop and dont care about super graphics quality any way its wasted HDD space that while not as crazy as the OP and first responders, download times make me not want to just delete and reinstall often.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

AAA file space or download size doesn't really affect me that much since my internet speed was upgraded and I have never had a download cap since ever, I also use powerless externals for the time being to store my games until I acquire new PC parts to make a new rig and then I'll have a new internal HDD to store them on so space isn't exactly a worry for me either.

On the other hand though I can see large file sizes being annoying for some and I can see that as a problem that needs to be sorted out, Titanfall and New order come to mind, if they'd simply sort them out for the future I believe we would all benefit from the smaller sizes, more games to fit on our consoles and HDD's/SSD's.

 

[brtt150]

My internet is slow although I don't have a data cap. So for instance, I have the digital version of CoD: AW on my PS4 and it took a good 12 or so hours to download.

 

[DrOswald]

Last Thursday, I was booting up Steam to play some TF2 when I happened to notice the news that CoD:AW would be free for the upcoming weekend.

"Oh goody!" thought I. "A chance to diversify my FPS palette!"

So I went to the game's store page, began the install, and continued content with myself when I noticed the space required.

36.5GB.

37,200MB.

Far more than my measly connection could ever hope to download. I can barely handle The Binding of Issac, much less this!

At my ~100kb/second, it would take over a day to install the files. It took about 12 hours for me to get TF2, and that's only 7.3GB.

*sigh*

What tales of woe can you share regarding bandwith?

Not exactly bandwidth, but I remember when I was gaming on a computer with 20 MB of space. It was a DOS machine, and it could only fit one game on it at a time. I had to decide which one of my games I wanted to be able to play at any given time, and the uninstall re install process was a pain in the ass, figuring drivers and trying to get games to work.

Also, where do you live that you get 100kb/s? That is just slightly better than dialup. I didn't know you could have internet that bad anymore. Are you sure you don't mean KB/s? There is a really big difference there.

Finally, that is probably the install footprint, not the amount of data you need to download. That is going to be heavily compressed.

TLDR: Get off my lawn youngin.

 

[Haerthan]

Oh gather around children, friends, brothers and sisters and listen to my tale of woe and warning:

If you ever buy Ubisoft, make sure that it isnt from STEAM. Because Uplay will fuck you up. If you download from Uplay your DL speeds will be atrocious. I had a download that came in with BYTES, not kilobytes or megabytes, BUT FREAKING BYTES. So yea, stay away from Uplay. That is the second thing I got to murder. First one being the Captcha from the Escapist. Damn that bot-stopping clanker is sentient sometimes I swear

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Not exactly bandwidth, but I remember when I was gaming on a computer with 20 MB of space.

Hard drives? Bloody luxury.

Actually, I think I have an old 10MB HDD in a drawer somewhere along with a CGA card. Installed DOS! 4 COLOURS! It was a magical time.

My TRS80 clone, my C64, my C128, my 'Miggy, my first x86 machine and my 300/300 modem, all now sadly relegated to stories I tell to young'uns about tech when it was still just for nerds. I also used to tell them about The Time Before Mobile Phones but stopped because parents complained I was giving their kids nightmares.

 

[Something Amyss]

If we don't have massive games, how can we possible appreciate TEH GRAFFIX

If you ever buy Ubisoft, make sure that it isnt from STEAM. Because Uplay will fuck you up. If you download from Uplay your DL speeds will be atrocious. I had a download that came in with BYTES, not kilobytes or megabytes, BUT FREAKING BYTES. So yea, stay away from Uplay. That is the second thing I got to murder. First one being the Captcha from the Escapist. Damn that bot-stopping clanker is sentient sometimes I swear

I always thought Steam's downloads were a function of Steam's service. My downloads cap out at about 2 MB/sec on a good day, with a 30 MB/sec download speed.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

What tales of woe can you share regarding bandwith?

On a 100Mb/s fibre optic connection? None.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

If we don't have massive games, how can we possible appreciate TEH GRAFFIX

Lossless compression algorithms!

 

[The Jovian]

What tales of woe can you share regarding bandwith?

Personally I have this exact same problem as you except that my internet is 100MB/sec, no I am serious. If I'm lucky Steam's download speed is 2MB/sec if I'm not it can get as low as 100KB/s, and that's when it isn't just completely dying for no reason (I'm serious sometimes I can't download shit or access internet in general), all because of Virgin Media's (my internet provider) decision to become the UK equivalent of Comcast. Seriously fuck Virgin, I'm switching over to BT or Sky as soon as I can.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Also, where do you live that you get 100kb/s? That is just slightly better than dialup. I didn't know you could have internet that bad anymore. Are you sure you don't mean KB/s? There is a really big difference there.

By fuck it would be easier if everyone adhered to the 'bits for transfer, bytes for storage' standard. Then we could have the long overdue Metric/SI prefixes Vs adapted binary based prefixes for units of measurement because a bunch of arseholes decided they could get pedantic with the SI prefixes and go all base-10 for advertised storage space.

 

[DEAD34345]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.