Why Are Games Getting MASSIVE Install Sizes? Here's a Tech Explainer

Many games had been published for the last five years, regardless of genre, have one thing in common: they all have insanely large install sizes. Take a look at your storage drives right now, and you'll see. Barring any old games that you might have (those older than six years), they range in sizes from 30 GB to over 50 GB. 

Heck, 50 GB used to be so big just around three, four years ago. Now, the most recent games have become too large (some even reach almost 100 GB install sizes, like "Call of Duty: Warzone") that it's presenting some sort of storage crisis in PC gaming and console gaming. Your 1 TB hard drive is no longer spacious enough.  

But why is that? Why are modern games getting these gargantuan install sizes? A quick look at modern PC gaming and console gaming tech reveals the answer.

Games Are Getting Massive Because of One Common Reason

PC Gamer did some digging into this "fad," and was able to determine that one thing stands out above everything else: texture assets.

Today's modern games often use high-resolution textures in the 2048x2048 resolution (aka 2K). Developers do whatever they can to store these textures in uncompressed game files to preserve their quality. Uncompressed 2K textures would typically be 16 MB. 

But put that in, say, a large open-world game which plans to use all those uncompressed textures on almost every single surface, and there's the problem. This is why to try and save space; developers try to limit the creation of unique textures whenever they can. 

But of course, 2K textures aren't the only ones. Most games these days now use even higher-resolution assets, such as 4K texture maps. Theoretically, this would increase file sizes four times, limiting the number of unique textures that developers can put and use in a game. For example, a 50 GB game only has room for 800 unique texture maps, and 150 GB can only accommodate 2,400. 

Back when the industry jumped from the 7th to 8th generation of console gaming (aka the switch to PS4 and Xbox One from PS3 and Xbox 360), one common fad was the release of separate texture packs for specific games. "Fallout 4" was one of these, receiving a high-resolution texture pack for PC, which ate up almost 60 GB of disk space by its lonesome. 

This is a very simplistic way of explaining the problem because going into detail will require a separate article. But technically, this is one of the major reasons why game installs are growing. 

Read also: Ray Tracing Explained: Demystifying This Gaming Generation's Biggest Buzzword

Textures Are Just One Part of the Equation 

But of course, high-resolution textures are not everything. Much of why games are consuming so much space right now is due to the massive leap in visual fidelity. That's what next-gen gaming is, really: the long-standing quest for almost photorealistic 3D rendered visuals. 

Digital Trends asked a handful of game developers about install sizes, and they were able to give far more answers than just textures. These devs, who worked on "Forza Motorsport 7" (a game that almost tips the 100 GB mark), claimed that car and character models, lighting, sounds, and almost everything else contributes to the game's storage footprint. 

A game like "Forza Motorsport 7" prides itself for accurately rendering real-life cars (700 unique ones, to be exact) from the windshield down to the engine block. And every single asset they create to render the cars will consume disk space. It's the same for audio files, lighting tech, and almost everything else. 

Now, the upcoming "Forza Horizon 5" will also include new gaming tech such as real-time ray tracing, which will again likely consume even more disk space. 

Will Games Keep Getting Bigger, Though? 

There are only two answers to this question. Developers will have to shrink their games' install sizes and potentially compromise their artistic visions. Or storage drive manufacturers will have to come up with bigger drives. 

But there is another more "indirect" answer to this: the advent of cloud gaming. If almost every game from here on out could be accessed online from an offshore machine instead of locally, then maybe massive game installs won't be a problem. But the thing is, internet speeds aren't fast enough yet to provide respectable latencies, and input lags for this to become widespread. 

Do you want to install play games on your PC or console? Better upgrade that SSD or hard drive, then. That's the price you'll have to pay for a truly next-gen gaming experience. 

Related: Xbox Game Pass September: 8 Games are Coming for Cloud, Console, and PC Featuring 'Final Fantasy XIII,' and MORE

This article is owned by Tech Times 

Written by RJ Pierce