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Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes?
(www.techspot.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Without reading the article:
All of those are in good faith. A part of it is in bad faith as well though. Studios forgoing or at least deprioritizing optimalisation. Why waste weeks on Q&A when you can just yawn and tell consumers to upgrade if it doesn't affect your bottom line?
Case in point: COD MWIII All of the internet is (rightly) shitting on it but Activision won't care because they'll likely still sell several million copies. What incentive does that give them to NOT fire entire Q&A departments and pocket those cost savings on top of the profits?
If the game is huge enough no one will have space to play anything else...
QA what? You can't QA and optimise huge ass textures to fit into a gig. I can tell you a story about high res images. My partner is a photographer. She did a commissioned project of 7 collage photos to be printed in large scale. She bought a 512 gig drive to work on a project. These 7 photos took 95% of the space of this drive in the end. Yeah, 500 gigs for 7 bloody photos!
But how big were the photos? That would be 70Gb per photo.
They are collages, meaning that each PSD file contains multiple super high res photos. But the end result is just 7 huge pictures on the wall.
As for the final pixel size, I don't remember now, but they're over 100mpx of 32 bit per channel of image data (that's 16 bytes per each pixel instead of regular 4).
With reading the article:
Your sight-unseen summary is far too detailed in comparison.
And readily available resources. No need to put effort into space saving tricks when space is so easy to come by
Plus downloadability. If you don't plan to play a game for a while, you can delete it and free up space, and have the ability to download it later.
Plus, expandable storage. If a player wants more space, I think that everything out there today is expandable, even consoles, without replacing existing storage. If, say, 10% of the player base wants to keep a larger library downloaded than their console's internal storage can handle, and the base console doesn't have enough space, they can just throw another USB drive on the system.
I guess maybe for portable devices, it could be obnoxious to carry the storage around.
Nah, portable devices use portable storage. The space available in microSD is nuts
If by nuts you mean, a very modest low single digit terabyte range. Which, according to the game sizes cited in the article could only hold around 6-10 games per terabyte. Given the way games tend to disappear from online sources over time, that doesn't seem like enough space to me to really keep all those digital purchases. I guess if most of them will become abandonware eventually anyway when the companies shut down their servers, it hardly matters.
Yes, that's nuts. I used to be very happy to have less than one and a half megs on something wider than a deck of cards. Now you're talking about terabytes on something the size of a pinky fingernail. I could store a half dozen in a pocket in my wallet without noticing them. That's a lot of storage.
For the record, only 6-10 games is also about 5-10 games more than I could store on one of those floppies, and if it was one it was an old game. It'd be akin to putting Halo: CE (not remastered or anything, original) on a micro SD.
So, yeah, storage is plentiful and readily available.
Yeah, I remember. My favorite DOS game was Scorched Earth, which fit on a high density 1.44MB floppy disk. But that was the point of the article. Space used to be at a premium and a terabyte used to feel like more space than I'd ever need. Now a terabyte is only just enough for portable devices because the cost of extra capacity was increasing so fast and development of space saving tech seemed like a waste of time, but that trend of increasing capacity and decreasing cost has significantly plateaued (as shown by the graph in the article).
Gamers: "we want photorealistic 3D graphics in 4K resolution!"
Also gamers: "why do games take up so much space these days?"