The Video Game Industry

They want to ditch physical media and proceed to make games that eat up ludicrous amounts of digital storage space. I'm pretty sure some PS5 games take up half of the internal storage, if not more.

Bloated is the word.
And why do we still have to look up to Triple A game companies when some indies are faring better?
And are there still single A and double A games?

Japan still makes plenty of AA games. The only japanese rpg series that runs on AAA money is Final Fantasy, everything else in that genre is pretty much AA.

Meanwhile Skyrim and New Vegas barely take up 10 G Bs each.

There have never been A or AA games. AAA is a marketing term intended to imply high quality. A and AA are back formations from that.

I remember that the original Mass Effect with all DLCs was about 20 Gb. Same with Dragon Age Origins with all DLCs. Kinda strange that nowdays a single game, with no DLC, can be over 100 Gb.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Jun 1st 2023 at 3:24:15 PM

It's a strange oddity. Civilization 6, including the expansion packs, had like a total of 22 GB or so when I downloaded it from Steam.

And then there's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is only a little above 16 GB, a game running on what's effectively outdated smartphone specs, a game that has three huge maps to explore, a game with a robust physics engine, can somehow only use 16 GB of space.

To be fair, Civ VI is a 2016 game, before file sizes became really crazy, and designed to run on low end computers.

From what I understand, most of the issues with file sizes happens to be because of high resolution textures and being unable to or being bad at compression.

On the Tot K note, it's using much of the same graphics as Bot W, and is only about 2 G Bs more.

Edited by tclittle on Jun 1st 2023 at 7:43:19 AM

A game like Civilization 6 is also pretty much always going to have a smaller file size though. The number of assets in a game like that is generally pretty limited compared to a AAA FPS game or whatever, because no one cares if a generic building is just the same model slightly rotated and copied a dozen times in a tile.

Just because the visuals are not as spectacular doesn't mean a game will be smaller. A complex AI simulator, for instance, could just as easily take up a lot of space.

I know this article that said that PC gamers are not ready for the era of 100 gb games. Pessimist in me says this is as much an upcoming “trend” as lootboxes and microtransations were considered trends too.

And there will be someone defending the 70 buck product exploding computers.

100 gb!?

-faints-

The article gave us a good metric on recent releases and how large they are by companies who arent running on a fossil.

• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - 130GB
• Forspoken - 120GB
• Redfall - 100GB
• The Last of Us Part 1 - 100GB
• Atomic Heart - 90GB
• Diablo 4 - 90GB
• Wild Hearts - 80GB
• Hogwarts Legacy - 73GB
• RE 4 Remake - 56GB
• Dead Island 2 - 45GB

RE 4 and Dead Island 2 is what I feel should be around the acceptable size of AAA games and storage space.

Edited by M1gamiTensei on Jun 1st 2023 at 10:04:07 AM

And here I am looking to buy a 2 Terabyte hard drive to archive my files while my SSD is for games.

Huge size game files aren’t even THAT new, XCOM 2 with it’s major expansion is like 70-80 GB if memory serves and that was released all the way back in 2017.

Yeah the CO Ds are similarly heavy.

According to business publication MLex (summarized by Resetera user Idas and posted on Twitter by Idle Sloth), Microsoft is looking to close the Activision-Blizzard deal sooner rather than later.

This may mean finding some way around the CMA blocking the deal.

One reason that I often get the Switch version of a game even if it's available on PC or other platforms is because the Switch version of the game usually doesn't take up much space.

For example, I play the Switch version of Monster Hunter: Rise. Even if the game didn't originally release as a Switch-exclusive for the first couple of months, I would have still gotten it on the Switch because the PC version is 36 GB for the base game alone. Compare that to the Switch digital version being around 19.5 GB, and that's probably including the expansion.

Sure, the Switch version doesn't have as good graphics as the PC version, but I've never really cared too much about graphics, so it's not a dealbreaker for me.

Moistcr1tikal (I hope he's not controversial to mention here) actually did a video about this recently and mentioned that the problem of file size and spec requirement of these games is probably due to a lack of funding for optimization because the devs are forced to push the game out of the gate as soon as possible and can't trim down the size of assets.

On the other hand, I think we are also reaping what we sowed when we encouraged AAA companies to make graphics the top priority.

I think we are about to hit a crash soon if this doesn't get rolled back, the idea that people now need like 10 Terabytes or more to have a game library -along with all the past crap that has come from the industry- is ridiculous.

Edited by raziel365 on Jun 1st 2023 at 3:09:15 AM

I feel like a lot of problems with the industry can be boiled down to higher ups not knowing how the process works and how long it takes.

Oh, so like every other industry!

The only way this leads to a crash is if people suddenly stop opening their wallets for THE LATEST GREATEST 4K HI DEFINITION GRAPHICS AND VOICE/MOCAP WORK FROM THAT AWESOME CELEBRITY THAT EVERYONE KNOWS AND LOVES. Dunno about y'all, but I'm not holding my breath.

Edited by Reflextion on Jun 1st 2023 at 6:20:08 AM

Unfortunately, it feels like a lot of games are being rushed out lately and that's hurting the industry since they aren't giving the developers enough time to perfect the games.

I dunno if it's really "hurting" the industry at this point. As long as people keep eating up all the broken games and shelling out money for shitty microtransactions and the like, the market isn't gonna crash anytime soon. Don't forget most of us who grew up with games in the 80s and beyond already know all the bullshit the industry will do, but the newer generation of gamers are growing up with said bullshit and they see it as a normal thing.