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Bigger Than Godzilla: Why Are Games Using So Many Gigabytes?
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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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).