AAA Game-File Sizes Are Getting Out Of Hand

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Oh come on, you know you secretly love games that require 50GB installs and come with a 40GB day one patch. ;)

The file sizes of video games always seem to get bigger with the move to each new set of consoles, and recent times are no exception. The difference today is that customers are increasingly being asked to acquire entire games straight out of the air instead of from a disc, and the sizes of today’s full-retail games are outpacing some people’s internet connections.
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I like how I had to download 60 gigs for FFXIII on PC and when I booted it up, there were no graphics options or ability to run it past 720p.
 
Yup, its totally stupid. And the worst part is that games that have been lovingly made by their creators over the course of like 20+ years like The Unreal World that are like 30MB of files, but are totally amazing, free (or like donate what you wanna), are pretty much ignored because they're not full of graphics and voice acting. :(
 
I own 8 Xbox One games. My HDD is 85% full. A couple demos are installed, also. 500 GB for 8 games is a bit much. I have the physical media for 7 of them. Titanfall was the only Digital download...
 
Megalith said:
I like how I had to download 60 gigs for FFXIII on PC and when I booted it up, there were no graphics options or ability to run it past 720p.
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That's just disgusting, stomach-churning disgusting. :mad:
 
Yet AAA batteries are smaller :p

It may be a feigned attempt at preventing games fitting on 25GB Blu Ray disks.
It doesnt make much sense as they can be transported easily using other means, but the protection industry is a bit barmy.
 
nerdydesi said:
That's just disgusting, stomach-churning disgusting. :mad:
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Oh, can it. With texture reuse (and plenty of other tricks to make one texture file look like many different variants), graphics aren't even the biggest cause of file size bloat, anymore.
 
Again, here i need to make my point out how these are bad for data caps. For me using the sizes mentioned in above, 50GB game + 40GB day one patch == 1/3 my monthly cap.

Save them from printing media, but pay more on the back end for more GB.
 
Whatever happened to procedural generation?

I've seen some impressive game assets generated on-the-fly, as apposed to being pre-generated and loaded from disk.

The above link is to an entire first person shooter that fits into 1MB of disk space. All 3D models, textures, animations, and sounds are generated at runtime. Doesn't take much space to store a bunch of math equations that solve-out to game assets.
 
So we now have graphics bloat to go along with all the code bloat?

Time to start installing TB drives in the consoles.
 
Unknown-One said:
Whatever happened to procedural generation?

I've seen some impressive game assets generated on-the-fly, as apposed to being pre-generated and loaded from disk.

The above link is to an entire first person shooter that fits into 1MB of disk space. All 3D models, textures, animations, and sounds are generated at runtime. Doesn't take much space to store a bunch of math equations that solve-out to game assets.
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But to make a techdemo a real game is a totally different deal, and if you want to craft your game to look a certain way, procedurally generated textures are not going to cut it. Plus the real thing taking up all the space is the sound.
 
The 50GB is to reserve the space on your hard drive. The 40GB enables the game so it can't be leaked.
 
Maybe they should start offering patches on media? Let those that can download MEGAsized patches do it, charge those that cannot a couple of bucks to cover the cost of the disk and shipping. Having said that....patch discs should cost EXACTLY what the media and shipping cost. It should not be a way to milk a few more bucks out of the customer.
 
Shmee said:
But to make a techdemo a real game is a totally different deal, and if you want to craft your game to look a certain way, procedurally generated textures are not going to cut it. Plus the real thing taking up all the space is the sound.
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It wasn't just a techdemo I linked, it was a fully playable first person shooter. The original intent was to expand it into a full release-quality game.

And you're missing the point, a bit. Not everything has to be procedurally generated in order to see massive space savings. Developers could save space by shifting to procedural generation where it makes sense. For example, an incredibly intricate and high-detail texture for a tile floor could be generated with a simple fractal.
 
Shmee said:
But to make a techdemo a real game is a totally different deal, and if you want to craft your game to look a certain way, procedurally generated textures are not going to cut it. Plus the real thing taking up all the space is the sound.
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lol wat, please stop. 650MB of compressed 144 kbps hq audio is like 12 hours.
 
@Shmee - ah I see, multiple languages and uncompressed audio these days. Though it say pre-rendered videos are the largest culprit.
 
Shmee said:
Plus the real thing taking up all the space is the sound.
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Okay I have to call bullshit on this. Just because Titanfall decided to do things bass-ackward doesn't mean it needs to be that way. There's no limit to how much space you can take up with textures and it translates to a better looking game the more space you throw at it. But sound, hell, a lot of games scrap the bottom of the barrel with sound quality, but let's say 80kbps for ogg vorbis for MONO sound. 192kbps MP3 / 160 kbps OGG sound decent enough for games. That's about 35.15MB for an HOUR of sound. So say you have 24 hours worth of sound effects, dialogue, music, etc, that's still 843MB.

But hey, let say say you want to be a maniac and have everything uncompressed at CD quality. Outside of music, the vast majority of sound can be mono since it's processed within the game engine. At 44khz 16 bit mono, that's about 5.05MB per minute of audio. So 24 hours worth of uncompressed, CD quality sounds would come to 7.2GB.

Sound is NOT what takes up the bulk of space unless the developer is doing something very wrong.
 
.kkrieger was an interesting experiment. I know and have worked with the guys at farbrausch/.theprodukkt. Somethings don't come easily with what they are doing. When it came out the start time was pretty hefty because it was making all the assets before launching. More importantly look at how much memory it is eating. I don't remember kk's memory footprint but .debris another of their sub 130k demos took up around 400 megs of ram back around 2007. I tried to help them get a much more advanced version on console as middleware but the platform holder shot them down. Mind you it did want to take 1+ spu's on the PS3 just for itself.

Now on the other front modern games an expectation. kk did not have Normal Maps, Bump maps, Speculatiy Maps, and modern material/shaders that are demanded/expected to show off the latest Gizmo 9000 videocard that someone spent almost a grand on. Doing them procedurally is to give an understatement of the year a stone cold bitch. People already expect seemless streaming etc and will go ballistic when loading times go up by very large amounts.

Don't get me wrong I really want to see procedural assets become a larger force in game development but honestly we need things to slow down hardware wise so we have time to really dig in.

Cheers

Croaker

PS: Yes audio is a huge portion of bloat - on the PS3 version of flOw 70+% of the payload was music assets.
 
well, why do games require 20-50 gb installations if textures still look total ass? is it all 17.3 channel uncompressed audio?
 
For everyone claiming it's audio, just throwing this out there:

Deus Ex Human Revolution (original version) has over 200,000 spoken lines of dialogue and takes up 8.5GB (including textures, models, everything else).

Textures can eat up as much space as you're willing to throw at them, with audio, you really have to work at it to bloat the space.
 
How could you even properly integrate 200,000 lines of dialog into a game in less than 1.7 years? Do the math ... that's like adding a new line every minute for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 1.7 years.
 
Because I am on DSL, my speeds are 15 down/3 up, which is still more than speedy but takes a while. How much of the game do I really need to start playing? Take the original Borderlands (since I'm familiar with that game). I only need the assets of the "Arid Badlands" section to start playing. While I'm starting to play that section, the assets of Skag Gully, Lost Cave, and Arid Hills can be downloading in the background. And, if I decide to quit and go to bed, the other pieces can then load up while I'm at work or sleeping.

What's the situation like presently? You have to download the entire game before you can play.

Another thing that was brought up in the article.... audio files for multiple languages. Last time I checked, I speak English. I don't need French, German, or Russian. It's a waste of space.
 
I don't care how big the game itself is, but there's zero reason for such HUGE patches. The majority of the size of these games come from textures and audio but their patch sizes seem to be insane. It would seem that their patching processes need to make better use of differentiating technologies. Or am I off base here?
 
Nenu said:
Yet AAA batteries are smaller :p

It may be a feigned attempt at preventing games fitting on 25GB Blu Ray disks.
It doesnt make much sense as they can be transported easily using other means, but the protection industry is a bit barmy.
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I would actually consider this a bonus, if I downloaded cracked games. It means groups uploading cracked versions are more likely to go to the trouble to re-encode, compress, and provide a one-click installer that does all the unpacking, cracking and other setup for you with less wasted bandwidth (a serious concern if you're on capped broadband). A game that would naturally fit on a blu-ray might just get ripped and uploaded without the special treatment in an effort to be the first to upload. When it's more important to upload a usable copy than the first copy, every pirate wins.
 
Having only a 7Mbps download connection, I am feeling the pain of games that are requiring bigger and bigger patches. I never thought I would see the day where I could set my console to download a game before I go to bed and it was still nowhere near completed when I woke up. On the plus side, we are getting some good games these days so I am neutral on this.
 
Large game downloads are meh. They come with the territory and it is really no surprise. I suppose you guys complaining were also doing so when games came on 5 to 7 cd?
 
ManofGod said:
Large game downloads are meh. They come with the territory and it is really no surprise. I suppose you guys complaining were also doing so when games came on 5 to 7 cd?
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Yes I was one of them...so what? Not everybody wants to act like a sheep and just bend over to take whatever comes along.
 
I complained about games on multiple CDs when DVD had high penetration among gamers. It was ridiculous. Only a couple games like Baldur's Gate also had a DVD version available.
 
With the likes of GTAV coming soon I've been wondering if we will see any pc games on bluray. Installing the old BF2 from 5 cd's sucked... now we're at the point where 5 dvds might not be enough. But when you have a launch-day patch that is almost as big as the game and _must_ be downloaded, then whats the point of even having optical media anymore!?

Disclaimer: I have FIOS and I still think that these monster game downloads are getting out of hand.
 
Just a quick study...
chart2.png
 
I do not belie the the file sizes are all that bloated.

I'd be really surprised if most of the[h] crowd dont have at least 1 ter of dis space.

The issue IMO is the extremely poor US bandwidth.

People want pretty and pretty has it's costs.
 
pcjunkie said:
Yes I was one of them...so what? Not everybody wants to act like a sheep and just bend over to take whatever comes along.
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How does accepting that video games gets bigger over time is being a sheep? As the games get more advance, higher graphics, audio, etc, these improvements comes with a storage cost. Can't expect additional information to come out of nowhere, they have to be stored somewhere.
 
Is this even a problem? Disk space is so cheap these days. A 1TB drive is like $50.

Games are always going to get bigger, it's the nature of advancement. Higher resolution textures (getting ready for 4K displays) higher poly models that newer faster GPUs can handle rendering, etc.
 
And yet amazing games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time could fit on a single 32MB cartridge, and could be run on a MIPS sub-100MHz CPU and only 4MB of RAM.
"Next-gen", I love it.
 
I remember my father about having a stroke when I did a full install of Baulder's Gate which was about 2.5 gig with the expansion that ate the majority of my 5gig hdd (because then he couldn't install his automotive software on MY pc).
My first "big drive" was 2 40gb 5400rpm Maxtors in RAID 0. Boy did that feel fast, never went back to a single drove after that one (until ssds).
Yuppers, we've come a hell of along way.
 
Steam use to piss me off this its updates for my games also when I was on a 10/1 connection.

Then I upgraded to a 45/4 connection and all these multi GB's downloads are no problem now.

I've since upgraded to 60/10 now and its even better. I do feel for people with slower connections though everything is going towards digital downloads now and less physical copies so this is only going to get worse for people with slow internet.
 
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