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Having a humongous game might be a competitive advantage in the era of live-service games.

Users might be more hesitant to switch to another game if it means uninstalling yours and reinstalling is a big pain in the backside due to long download times.

More likely once they uninstall it, they never reinstall it because they'd have to clear out so much other stuff to fit it back in.

I guess it's a lock-in effect of sorts.

I've often seen people mention that one reason for games like Call of Duty being so enormous is optimising for performance over storage. You'd rather decompress textures/audio files at install-time rather than during run-time, because you download/install so infrequently.

It's amusing we had a 2x-10x compression and negligible perfomance hit on 486 with DBLSPACE yet in 2020+...

> I think COD games are regularly hundreds of gigs

I looked up the size of the latest one, and Sony's investment in RAD Kraken seems to be paying dividends:

Xbox: 214 GB

PC: 162 GB

PS5: 96 GB

that xbox install size is insane