Why are games so large?

[CyberNinja]

2k23. 127 GB's, RDR2 105 GB's, Jedi Survivor, 147 GB's

[CyberNinja]

yeah

[kilésengati]

I think there's a real possibility with minimising space needed for game graphics by replacing textures with shaders and vector graphics and further utilising advanced tessellation technologies. Much more realistic and infinitely scaleable, but needs more processing power.

[Sir Seanicus, Esq.]

Because how else are you gonna get an apology letter day one?

[CyberNinja]

ok

[Your_White_Knight]

Първоначално публикувано от Platinum Gamer:

Why are games so large?

2k23. 127 GB's, RDR2 105 GB's, Jedi Survivor, 147 GB's

The code has empty space purposely built in for later patches, fixes, and additions... lazy coding

[Yarr]

To push hardware sales and keep hardware demands high for continual sales of new equipment instead of utilizing clever and efficient rendering techniques which would allow modern games to run on old hardware.
If you are really interested in the subject then research bloatware and designed obsolence too.

[Alliesaurus]

Games be thicc now

[Haruspex]

Crazy high res textures with no compression. Super high resolution cg cutscenes. A general lack of any kind of optimization or care for space or performance. A need to push bigger, better, more in an effort to keep us needing to buy increasingly bigger, more expensive, and more powerful hardware lest the FOMO sets in.

What developers fail to realize is that a good game will still sell and be popular even if it uses Xbox 360 level graphics in 2023. Look at f-ing Minecraft. 16x16 textures on blocks. Best selling game in all of history. AAA developers have their priorities all twisted and screwed up.

[jgilligan]

Games are wildly more complex and visually rich than they were "back in the day".

Many games are near photorealistic, many games have rather sophisticated AI or wildly more sophisticated logic in play regarding combat or strategy than in previous generations of games.

But the principle of "work with what you have". So you use the hyperthreaded whatnot because you have it.....or was a game written for 8bit CPU's and 64k of RAM "better".

In that regard it's not better or worse, it's what you can do with the resources available.

[Siluva]

Because devs don't bother optimizing their games anymore and just assume everyone have 100PB RAID mounted of storage and triple SLI of RTX999999 Titan Ti Z. So they just throw uncompressed 16K .TGA texture files, models with 99999999 morbillions of tris and call it a day.

[HALO_run]

Първоначално публикувано от Platinum Gamer:

2k23. 127 GB's, RDR2 105 GB's, Jedi Survivor, 147 GB's

that's not really big take a look at ark with all it's dlc being one thee biggest games on steam

[Devsman]

UHD textures are the #1 reason why, and it's by a landslide.

8 bits per channel, 3 or 4 channels per pixel, 8 million pixels on the screen... At least one unique texture for each building, vehicle, character... Overworlds that rival real world cities in size...

Първоначално публикувано от Rumpelcrutchskin:

Voice acting adds pretty good chunk too.

Voice acting is a lot of data but it's peanuts compared to the textures. What do they run it at, 44k 16 bit? Something in that ballpark. Usually they record at absurd fidelity but resample for the game itself. Using that as a baseline, one Megabyte is 11 seconds of audio. If somebody recites the whole Lord of the Rings, we're talking 12 or so Gigabytes.

[Marius]

Because developers think it's graphics before gameplay, but honestly we've seen this in the early 2000's as well. Games became larger, until late 2000's / Early 2010's our HDD's and early SSD's were big enough. Now history is repeating. In 2030 our SSD's will be like 30TB / 100TB easily, and these game will just fit perfectly.

[AdahnGorion]

Първоначално публикувано от Platinum Gamer:

2k23. 127 GB's, RDR2 105 GB's, Jedi Survivor, 147 GB's

Those are console games, they are known for poorly compression.
As for this game, the scope of it and what it entails graphically is one thing, even with compression.

[SMIFFY]

Because devs are too lazy to give people a choice of texture sizes to download.