If you glitch outside of the stadium, you can actually load in GTA and Cyberpunk 2077 depending on which direction you go.
Less people have the opportunity to pirate it with the fuckhuge download and install
There is one simple reason: the bigger the game, the fewer other games you can install. So why spend time optimising size on disk, if it will just cut into the live service profits of your game?
I don’t think that’s a reason they use. If anything, I’d expect live servicr games to benefit from the game being smaller, because they want players to not uninstall it when they’re feeling finished.
But “why bother” certainly is. There’s not that many players who will not buy your game just because it’s big. Most games are focused on the initial sale. Optimizing for size is expensive. Why spend thousands of dollars of expensive software dev time while making the game more complex to test for something that won’t affect many sales? Especially compared to fixing bugs or adding more noticeable features. Software dev is always a matter of tradeoffs. Unless you’re making something like a mars probe, there will always be bugs. Always always always. How many people will complain about a bug (which unexpectedly turned out to be game breaking in some niche case you didn’t think about)?
I don’t think that’s a reason they use. If anything, I’d expect live servicr games to benefit from the game being smaller, because they want players to not uninstall it when they’re feeling finished.
The smaller the game, the more likely you are to uninstall when you’re done, because it’s easier to re-install (and you don’t need to free up lots of space). Large size means you’ll keep it installed so you don’t miss the next content drop. Keeping it installed means you’re more likely to play, because you have less choice.
It’s a combination of sunk cost and FOMO.
I recently bought the 2021 remaster of a strategy game from 2004 and it was almost 50 GB. Add another 12 GB if for some reason you want the 4k textures on models from 2004. This game used to come on a CD.
4k and 8k textures are huge. Upscaling the textures takes a lot of extra space surprisingly. That’s usually the single biggest thing bloating a games size.
The crazy thing is that a lot of today’s models are actually much more simple than they used to be. Look at comparisons for old games like Mario Galaxy versus Mario Odyssey for good examples. But this is done because it allows for more detailed environments; The lack of polygons means that (as long as the textures can be loaded fast enough) your rendering goes much faster. You’re not being bottlenecked by polygon counts anymore, because there are fewer polygons.
But this has caused texture sizes to balloon, because now you’re shifting nearly all the heavy lifting over to those textures instead of the polygons.
For more graphically intensive games actually, this is shifting back bc polys are a lot cheaper than texel density these days. Games like Star Citizen, Alien Isolation, Cyberpunk and Starfield (or other hardsurface elements in games like firearms or vehicles) with insanely intricate hardsurface elements that the player needs to be able to be up close all around and inside can’t use baked normals due to the fact it’d just be impossible to get a decent texel density and bake, so now games are shifting to something called ‘face weighted normals’ which basically means that all the big bevels and chamfers are actually part of the model’s geo instead of being baked down. Smaller stuff like greebling will be a flat plane shrink wrapped to the curvature of a surface with baked detail as a displacement or normal map.
To be clear, the 4k textures are an optional free extra download that bumps the install size up significantly above the ~50GB. The 1024x1024 textures that come with it as standard will still have taken up a good chunk extra over 2004’s version though, of course
I’ve dug around in the files a little bit for modding purposes and as far as I can tell, one of the biggest reasons for bloat is the way that they implemented an ethnicity system in the remaster. In the original, units just had a skin colour that was roughly appropriate for the historical home region of the faction they’re from. In the remaster, they added a system that gives the units some variety in appearance that takes in to account where the unit was recruited; if you recruit soldiers in England, they’ll be paler on average than the ones recruited in Algeria. However, it seems like the way this was implemented was to give every single unit a unique texture for every ethnicity. There’s no common set of, say, five-ten faces for southern European men, for example. Every single unit has one southern European face, one northern European face, one north African face etc etc. Same goes for the visible skin on the rest of the body. Multiply that across about a thousand different units and suddenly you’ve got an utterly absurd number of nearly identical textures. And since this a strategy game, players are basically never looking at any of them at a level of zoom that affords each unit more than a few dozen pixels.
The secret? SSDs.
There’s no need to be smart or clever about compression or implementation, since all files can be called immediately from the hard drive.
No need to create iterative processes now since you can just brute force the entire production. It is technologically superior, it creates superior performance, yet has the drawback of huge file sizes.
Audio is also huge for most games. Especially if the game has a lot of dialogue and offers several languages. AAA, dialogue heavy games can have hundreds of hours of audio for a single language.
I think people also have an odd idea of what it takes to photorealistically depict a fucking stadium full of people and players with realtime reflections and sweating normal maps. The texture info alone is gonna be huge, but likewise there are tons of high res models animating in realtime all over the screen. So yeah, this being a gigantic install makes sense if 4k res gaming is what people want to play.
Yeah, I feel like the improvements in gaming hardware have gone 50% to improving dynamic systems and graphics, and 50% to messy project bloat. Not to mention the constant crunch culture means they never have time to clean things up before launch, and after launch is for game breaking bugs and DLC.
I mean I can understand how textures add up but 161 gigs for a basketball game seems like a lot of unoptimized stuff going on
The majority of the space on modern games is taken up by high definition audio. Those thousands of commentator lines add up to dozens of gigs alone.
Do they not even use compression anymore? I’ve been wondering since Steam came out if I was downloading compressed game files or wasting bandwidth every time. They used to try to conserve storage, compressing everything to fit on one or two discs (or floppy disks before that)
“Japanese game dev has been here”
“How can you tell?”
“30fps cap”
“Is Bethesda a Japanese word?”
Image Transcription:
A version of the White Man Has Been Here meme showing a Robert Griffing painting of two Native American trackers examining footprints in the snow. One is standing and the other squatting, both are holding rifles. The squatting tracker is saying “western game dev has been here.”
His standing companion asks “How can you tell?”
The first tracker replies, “161 GB for a basketball game”.
The footprints in the snow have been replaced by a screen shot of an X/Twitter notification by Saved You A Click Video Games replying to a post by GameSpot reading “NBA 2K24 File Size Revealed, And It’s Even Bigger Than Starfield - Report dlvr.it/Svvggh2” accompanied by an image of a basketball player for the Lakers team. The Saved You A Click Video Games’ response reads “It’s 161GB on Xbox Series X|S.”
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