Video game install sizes don’t seem to be getting smaller. Middle Earth: Shadow Of War (2017), Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) and The Last of Us Part 2 (2020) take up about 95 GB, 101 GB (150 GB on PC) and 99 GB respectively. The upcoming Spider-Man Miles Morales game takes up about 105 GB on PS 5 for the re-mastered base game with the standalone expansion. The most famous offender, Call of Duty Modern Warfare + Warzone now takes up over 200 GB on PC. Why wasn’t this a problem during the PS 3 and Xbox 360 era, why have install sizes ballooned this generation?
A major cause for this would be texture sizes. Most PS 3 and Xbox 360 games targeted 720 p. This generation, 1080 p was the standard until the PS 4 Pro and Xbox One X released in 2016 and targeted 4K. This also meant in game textures had to be made higher resolution too. This coupled with the fact that games are getting longer and more detailed (That means no more reusing the exact same textures everywhere) means there are hundreds of thousands textures for a single game. This affects open world games the most (And there are a lot of those this generation).
Complex lighting for environments is often very heavy to calculate during runtime, so games without dynamic day and night cycles tend to have lighting and shadow information baked into the textures themselves. This means assets that occur in different lighting conditions, like the eyes of a character, need to have multiple textures corresponding to different lighting conditions.
Another reason is that lower end systems (That includes the PS 4 and the Xbox One, they’re built with mid-range hardware from 2013 after all) can’t handle running games and decompressing the data at the same time so by including uncompressed data in the install files, load times should be shorter and performance should be smoother (No stuttering when entering a new region of the game). Shorter load times is an interesting point, if the load times are short enough games could effectively mask them with off-screen asset streaming and some clever level design like an elevator ride or squeezing through a crack in a cliff (This is exactly how God of War manages to have a one-shot camera that never cuts).
Character models have gotten more detailed too. A lot of games don’t have pre-rendered cut-scenes anymore so real-time cut-scenes with intricate animation work for detailed character models would take up a lot of space.
The reasons aren’t necessarily technical, reducing and compressing game data without noticeably affecting performance takes a lot of time and effort and not all developers think it’s worth it anymore (15 years ago, all in game textures would come up to about 500 MB without compression, now it’s 50+GB, that’s a lot more work). It’s easier to just throw a ton of textures into the game even though in reality a lot of those textures are probably similar enough that you could replace 15 of them with 1 generic texture that you cleverly alter at runtime to make every instance of it seem different.
A big studio would have 300-500 people working on a AAA game, but only a couple of those developers would be in charge of building the installer. The majority of developers and artists making content don’t even know how big the game is, let alone care. Not to mention, the final file size would only become apparent towards the end of development, when everyone would be scrambling to get the game ready by the release date, and nobody has time to worry about file sizes.
It’s not without hope though, if developers put in the effort, games can be made smaller. One of the longest games of all time, The Witcher 3 (2015) is only about 34 GB with its DLCs and the The Witcher 3 GOTY Edition (Which comes with the DLCs) is even smaller at 30 GB without removing any content. CD Projekt Red managed to do this with better file structuring and removing redundancies. Hopefully more studios take the time to do this too.
Article by Ajay Bharadwaj, 3rd year Btech. Information Technology