Ask Lemmy

I see you've never played an indie game. 60 gb? That's like 50 game installs right there.

I don't really think that I have a range that's anywhere near that narrow.

First, some of my favorite games are roguelikes (e.g. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or Caves of Qud), and they often have very few assets, which is where all the data in larger games comes from.

It looks like the largest release of Cataclysm (the one with the graphics and sounds) unpacks to be 586MB. Caves of Qud

actually, I'm surprised that it's this large

has a 1.4GB directory in Steam after installation.

I have a hard time imagining a lower bound (short of maybe demoscene type stuff, where I'd be surprised that stuff could fit into so little space). But I have a hard time imagining avoiding a game because it's too small.

Second, I don't think that there are any commercial games out there that are going to cause me to not play them due to storage space. Starfield is probably the largest I've done, and while it uses enough disk space that I'm not going to leave it installed if I don't plan to play it anytime soon, it's not an issue to store it.

https://twinfinite.net/features/biggest-games-all-time-ranked-install-size/

This says that Starfield has a 125 GB install.

The largest that they have listed there is ARK: Survival Evolved , at 435 GB. That does seem a little excessive to me, but, I mean, you can get a 4TB NVMe drive on Amazon right now for ( checks ) ~$200, so that's really $25 in storage, and when you're not playing it, you can just uninstall it and put something else there. As gaming hardware goes, $25 just isn't that big a deal.

In theory, I could imagine some sort of game that procedurally-generates a dynamic world as one explores that has massive save files or something, something in the vein of Minecraft-style games. Disk space there could be theoretically unbounded. So you could design a hypothetical game that I'd object to. But...I don't really think that there's really a practical limitation that excludes games for me today today.

Internet speeds are kind of irrelevant to me. I can download and install Helldivers 2 in the space of 15 minutes. So speed is irrelevant. Space, also kind of irrelevant but not nearly as much. Most of my space is dominated by memes, I wonder why. However, nonetheless, 20 gigs. It pisses me off when I see anything that goes above 50 or 70, and I don't know if that's just from playing on console for years or what, but it drives me absolutely fucking insane.

I hope at one point, big game devs optimize their game sizes. If I'm correct, a big chunk of modern game sizes (this big ones) are 4k textures and similar items that 90% of people dont need, why haven't these been deparated from the core game as free DLC?

Anything bigger than 50gb makes me quite upset.

.kkrieger is damn cool, it is a full 3D FPS that only takes up less than 100 kilobytes.

The game was released in the demoscene back in 2004.

I have played it, it is damn impressive feom a technical point of view, but it isn't very fun as a game. Visually it is stunning when you consider the size and the tech at the time, it looks quite atmospheric with bloom and impressive textures.

Nostalgia Nerd made a video about it:

https://youtu.be/bD1wWY1YD-M

40-70 GBs is the sweet spot for me. My Wi-Fi can download it within a day usually and I can fit a bunch of them onto my 1 TB SSD

1 GB is very good, 10 GB is good, 30 GB is okay, 60 GB is very big.

Warranted or usefulness depends on the game.

I would prefer titles like battlefield offering downloading or dropping only singleplayer and multiplayer.

Guild Wars 1 offered streaming on demand, or predownloading all data. It was possible back then, and would be possible today.

I went to install Knights of the Old Republic last night, it's on sale for $3.00 on steam. Misclicked on Star Wars: The Old Republic, and had a moment of shock when the install size was over 50 gig. Then I realized my error. 3 gigs is much more understandable.

Maybe I should do a let's play. I've never played the game and have managed to avoid most spoilers.....

About a year ago I got a high-speed (so-called "gaming") hard drive on sale for about 100 USD. It has 8TB, so I kinda stopped uninstalling games or worrying about file sizes.

I don't really play any games that have more than 80GB file size anyway, but I imagine at around 90-100 is when I'd start being reluctant to download.

As for what I prefer, I feel like smaller file sizes usually yield better games on average. If I find a game that has 100MB download, I'm already lookin like this: 😏
I'm pretty happy with anything up to 10GB. If the original Dark Souls (my favorite game) is 8GB, surely that's within an order of magnitude of the maximum file size a game can reasonably be, for me at least.

I think it would all really depend on what the game was capable of. Think of something like guild wars 2 which takes 70 gigs.

If they made all of the NPC’s in that game, be interactive, and somehow added in AI for its dialogue. I don’t like AI talking, but if there were chats that you could do with random NPC‘s. I’d happily double that size for hard drive space.

No, the NPC‘s had voice actors, not AI speech, but actual voice actors human beings who recorded dialogue. And I could actually have a conversation ‘s. Quadruple the space if you wanted to.

10GB max otherwise I'm not going to keep it installed

I see a game more than a 1.5 gigs, I start having second thoughts. I only play indie games, though.

I tend towards games that are on the small end, less than 20Gb in general. That covers almost all of my favourites that I have put more than 100 hours into. Some that I have out over 1000 hours into are under 1Gb and are still very intense. That said, if I got a new game which was supposed to look good I would be happy with 70Gb, but more than that feels like lazy studios churning our high res textures to cover up bad design. You can absolutely reuse textures in creative ways to drop the scale of your storage requirements. If you really need massive assets for your top graphics tier then make multiple versions of the assets and allow a smaller install. I don't need games that are in the Tb range.

40-50GB is enough for a 1080P game.

If you want 2/4K textures, add a free DLC to the store page like Fallout 4 did.

Anything more than 100 GB Feels like the devs just want to take space on my drive so I don’t play anything else

30gb or maybe 40gb tops

I am somewhat stuck in the past. ~7mbps internet on a good day, (fast) storage is not unlimited, computer is 2019 sale parts except still using 2016 budget GPU (1050Ti).

100MiB or under: it's free real-estate

600MiB: I can tolerate this as an average size

2GiB: common AA size, function and quality better match

15GiB+: this is probably not worth it, beyond eye-candy maybe

60GiB+: This is diminishing returns, and likely multiple technical (and arguably better) choices could have avoided such bloat.

More understandable with physical media, though my last console did not age gracefully (YLoD, another unit I got via barter runs but probably has dry thermal paste). Also I mostly play free (and/or older) games these days.

Also personally: polygons are often enough. See Spyro's vertex color skyboxes:

My issue is more because of bandwidth than storage, anything over 20gb means I'm not downloading it at home unless I super super super want to play the game, because at 20gb that's probably an all day long download and will fuck my net for the day

I stopped buying new games when physical discs went the way of the Dodo. I have plenty of older games that would keep me entertained till I die (I think I won't even get to finish most of them), so I don't have a direct stake in this discussion.

Just wanted to say it amazes me when I read here how big games have gotten. I still sometimes get surprised at Word documents that wouldn't fit on a floppy anymore. And I remember running Civ 2 from an external Zip disc because I didn't have the space on my HDD ( the game came on a single CD). It was a bitch waiting for the advisors to load from what was essentially a 100MB floppy connected through a parallel port. But I digress. The point is, anything that wouldn't fit on a DVD is absolutely unfathomable for me, and you people are talking about 100GB+ games here...

My understanding is that the vast majority of space is dedicated to high resolution textures. I don't have a 4k monitor and I don't need ultra high fidelity textures. Why can't they just be an additional download rather than a required part?

I think 50gb is a fairly reasonable max size for most games.

Games should be less than 60 GB unless they are massive in scale (BG3) with tons of assets. Even then, they should have an option to not load the highest res textures that are used in less than 4k ultra kinds of settings since the majority of bloat is textures.

But games with a lot less going on and poor optimization are a bane on PC gaming. Helldivers 2 on PC is like 140 GB now while only 35 GB on console because of asset duplication and other poorly optimized PC choices. They really need to get that sorted out.

Currently I don't have a real limit as I've gone all in on massive amounts of drive space explicitly so I can install all the games I want despite only playing two or so at a time. Previously I would really think hard about anything over 50 GB just because updates frequently added another 20+GB to the drive during the upgrade process which would sometimes hit space limits if I wasn't paying attention.

It's not the size, it's a size to content/quality ratio. I'll happily download a 500GB game if it's got the content to match.

Uncompressed assets doesn't bring higher quality visuals or content, it's merely pure laziness or a scam to make people feel like they're getting more for the outrageous price games have gotten.

I wouldnt get a game over 10 gb

I'm running things on a 500GB SSD drive so anything north of 100GB is a hard sell. I'm also on low-mid specs so it's generally not much of an issue. The games I play mostly fall in the 0-5GB category but I do play the occasional 20-50GB.

One of the biggest games I've played on my PC is Red Dead Redemption 2 at 120GB.

I can take a huge pc game, deep and hard into my hard drive.

It's not something I've ever considered, honestly. My only criteria is 'do I want to play this game?' That said, the only games I've said 'yes' to that question lately with large download sizes are the Doom games, and some racing simulators.

I'm not comfortable with any game that takes over 100Mb for core game files. That's insane.

As big as can fit ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

For real though, Read Dead Redemption 2 is like 120 GB but totally worth it, and Silksong is what, 1.2 GB and also totally great?

It doesn't matter, unless it's that one game that pushes me over the edge into needing a new motherboard because my current one can't handle yet another hard disk. Then I get annoyed and save a little money to upgrade, then I have fun again.

If developers give a basic download with HD textures and english as the default language then the file size would come down drastically, then offer everything else as a separate download if required. I hate that games have gotten so damn huge and tend not to play anything over 15GB

I think 50-60 GB is a fair enough size for a larger game.

Well my favorite game ever is Dwarf Fortress so it kinda depends on how long I play. The game is only like 500MB but the saves can just keep getting bigger as more stuff in the game is created.

It's all procedurally generated except for the 16x16 pixel tile graphics.

I'd say 30 GB? Though that seems like an unattainable dream lately. I still remember when the ~4 GB San Andreas felt really huge.

Storage is cheap, and with services like gog/steam it’s easy to just uninstall if I need space and reinstall when I’m ready to play.