Memes

Just wait for the cracked version, they often reduce the size while they are at it.

storage is cheap

My guy, if you talk about slow ass HDDs then yes, but games have become so large that you have to have a SSD at least to have enough read speed for reasonable loading time for shaders, textures, etc.

Each main cod is 150gb now

Downloaded dmz for some friends on pc it's 68 so consoles probably see 75-80 if not more

This is BEFORE the fact that On console, each game demands its own space to unpack the entire thing when it tries to update. So on PS5 not only is the game 150gb, but you need 150 free space to update meaning the game is functionally a "ghost" 300gb (I uninstalled cold war over this shit, I don't have time or room on a console for that fucking nonsense)

You'd think, thanks to removing HDDs, we'd no longer need file duplicates (because physics) and games get smaller again. But then you get unoptimized 4k textures and huge language packs for the 10000 hours of cutscenes, which you all have to always download. sigh

An order of magnitude more. It's nearly half a terabyte.

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On console: Mw2 150gb warzone2 115gb Mw2s "cod hq" for launching games 50gb (the only mandatory one) Mw3 seems to be about 190 looking at articles. (For campaign, zombies and warzone)

They're starting to obfuscate where each thing comes from now with the Cod HQ Launcher to play off the size of the games. As well as let you delete components like zombies and campaign to "save space" that they hoarded.

ARK survival evolved with all its DLCs is ~450 :')

It's hard and it particularly slows down the asset production process which is already a disproportionately slow and expensive part of development. Way easier to let the artists go apeshit exporting everything at 8k and a billion polygons because storage is cheap in a production environment.

Compression could help in theory, but then you'd have to decompress assets on the fly which takes a significant amount of processing power. The industry is trying to reduce the latency of getting assets into memory, compression would be moving the other way from that.

If you're conspiratorially minded then you might also conclude that it's to prevent people from having another major live service game installed on base model consoles, making you more likely to keep playing the one you've already installed. A kind of walled garden effect.

Requires effort. Also I'm thoroughly convinced hardware and software companies do it on purpose.

It's like the whole wearing Nike as your sponsor, the devs are paid to make it badly optimized so customers are encouraged to buy new tech.

remember when they managed to squeeze a game with 3d+music into a CD? (Lego island)

Back then a CD had about as much storage as your entire hard drive. Also, lego island isn't really a AAA game. A AAA game from 1997 would be something like final fantasy 7, which came on two whole CDs. Drive capacity hit a boom around the 2000s and 2010s, and only recently have AAA games been catching up.

People always want to blame this shit on game developers being lazy, and they're not wrong that a lot of AAA games are bug ridden messes designed to please shareholders. But games are getting more and more complex, and these developers are being forced to work under strict time constraints.

That doesn't mean there isn't room to improve. Maybe offering different download options depending on your storage needs should become a common practice (iirc some games used to do that back when internet bandwidth was limited).

War Thunder coming in being an 11 years old game and still needing a NASA computer to run with graphics that look like the PS2 era.

It’s getting 100% intentional. I find it ironic when CoD used to be known for being a fairly storage conscious game and now it’s this monstrosity we see before us. Glorified $70 DLC that takes up MORE space than the game it was made for