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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

In this day and age you can buy a 2TB M.2 SSD for $140. Even if you only gamed AAA that’s a ton of games. How often would you really make use of all of that space, to the extent where keeping extras on an external HDD would be too much of a hassle?

Perhaps my lived experience is too different. I typically keep a small handful of games that I play frequently, like Halo Infinite or Cyberpunk 2077. Both have huge memory footprints, but not much when HD space is measured in terabytes…

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The problem is that if there is zero push-back, then game companies will just expand to meet the limits. Modern Warfare hit 256GB[0], literally larger than most SSDs at the time. The reason it was huge was supposedly because it shipped uncompressed audio to support a fraction of the user-base who couldn't support decompression fast enough.

0. https://screenrant.com/cod-modern-warfare-file-size-too-big-...

Sounds like a low cpu overhead compression approach would have helped here, something like lossy lz4 :)

I wonder how the average game install size trends vs. bytes per dollar of different storage types (HDD and NVME separate). My gut reaction suggests that storage is scaling faster than game install needs, but then I remember back to how MW2019 took up some 200GB. The other muddy thing in this comparison is that it seems gamers play higher proportions of older games as time goes on, the AAA scene is definitely not what it used to be 5-15 years ago.

Older games have a tiny footprint.

Timeless classics like KOTOR 1&2, Fallout New Vegas, Mass Effect etc take so little space I barely notice the storage.

The entire library of video games ever made before the year 2000 could fit onto a single SD card off the shelf from Best Buy for the cost of a mid-range restaurant dinner for 2.

Not so sure about the last line. DOS games alone eXoDOS v5 is ~500GB packed, ~600GB installed, ~1.2TB every game unpacked. Not quite SD level, but $50 dodgy Chinese 2TB SATA SSD sure. Windows up to 2000 will probably be another couple TB.

It comes close to that, but there are some confounding factors wherever you introduce analog elements - and Golden Age arcade games were doing all kinds of wacky analog things that necessitate high fidelity digital sampling. See "Journey" and its tape playback of rock band Journey, or "Dragons Lair" and every other laserdisc game. Classic pinballs are likewise presented digitally through a mishmash of ROM emulation and simulated physical hardware.

It's definitely the case, though, that games have essentially topped out on what they need to support a high fidelity experience in terms of "just" pushing more data down the pipe. While new AAA can push a little farther still, there is broad consensus that diminishing returns are here, and...well, the future is going to be in having AI do the details and make the optimizations, and the resulting size from that is most likely going to stay linear with the number of assets, rather than having each asset metastasize further detail.

I agree with this, and especially when you look at cost of storage over time which is to say the filesizes that we think are large today will be small by tomorrow’s standards and the drives that are expensive today will be almost trivially cheap by tomorrow’s standards.

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