Why PC Game Downloads are so Big

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
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PC Gamer has an article up today looking into why on earth our game downloads keep getting so damned large. They blame things like uncompressed audio for 17 languages when you only need one, having to download alternate 4k textures even if you'll only ever play at 1080p, and forcing you to download both multiplayer and single player versions of a game, even if you only want one of them. To solve this they suggest an approach we are all too familiar with, namely the modular install. "Install on first use" anyone? Personally I think this would be a great idea. Install what you want, not what you don't!

Just to break that down into more concrete terms: If the PC version of Infinite Warfare were released during the Xbox 360 era, it would’ve required approximately ten DVDs to hold all that data. Even with Blu-ray, you’d need two dual-layer discs for Infinite Warfare alone.
 
I'm rocking a 1TB SSD, but I'm still always on the cusp of running low on space. I love the idea of having options for downloading things like other languages. Some items (like audio and 4K textures) I wouldn't skimp on, but it would still be nice to have the option.
 
and forcing you to download both multiplayer and single player versions of a game, even if you only want one of them.
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OK that's stupid. You paid for it.
Maybe I should have told the dealership to keep the backseats in my car because no one rides back there.
 
Armenius said:
I'm up to about 4TB of total storage, 1TB of which is SSD. I'll never buy another HDD again, though. Probably going to add another 1TB 850 Pro here, soon. Go [H] or go home.
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I've always gone by the "small SSD + huge secondary storage" philosophy. I started with a 120GB model, which I split in half, half for Windows, half for Linux, but over the years it has grown. 400GB now, about 240GB for Windows and games, and the rest for Linux. It's been serving me well, but maybe I'll need something larger in the not too distant future... My secondary storage is my 48TB NAS. No spinners in my main rig!
 
WorldExclusive said:
OK that's stupid. You paid for it.
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No one is suggesting that you don't own the rights to both, just that if you currently want to play one, but not the other, you only have to keep one of them installed. Do you keep all of the games you own installed? I own countless games in Steam, but only 2-4 are installed at any given time. Same concept.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
To solve this they suggest an approach we are all too familiar with, namely the modular install. "Install on first use" anyone? Personally I think this would be a great idea. Install what you want, not what you don't!
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The problem is you are assuming that the average PC gamer is as smart as you and will tolerate being told to "wait" as something downloads even though it is minimizing your HDD space. From a customer service point of view is better to tolerate bitching about big downloads or a litany of complaints caused by unintended consequences of modular downloads? One big download is a very KISS approach and probably why it sticks around.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
No one is suggesting that you don't own the rights to both, just that if you currently want to play one, but not the other, you only have to keep one of them installed. Do you keep all of the games you own installed? I own countless games in Steam, but only 2-4 are installed at any given time. Same concept.
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OK I can agree with that.
 
If you will not give me the DVDs or Blu Rays, then do something before I get pissed off enough to move to a console.

Oh yeah, and make the game work right on day one so I don't need a damn big ass patch behind it.
 
Danny Dawg said:
If you will not give me the DVDs or Blu Rays, then do something before I get pissed off enough to move to a console.

Oh yeah, and make the game work right on day one so I don't need a damn big ass patch behind it.
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Day 1 patches are mainly for DRM, not bug fixes.
 
Games with both single and multieplayer usually share assets, so it might not save much space keeping them separate.
 
4 of my larger games take up 250GB on my SSD,
game-install-sizes-2017.jpg
 
What exactly is a 4K texture versus 1080p texture? I get what they're trying to say, one is simply higher res, but is there an actual technical property to it, like the resolution of a texture at a certain distance from the camera? Are textures in RAGE considered 240p while procedural textures are infinite?
 
Armenius said:
I'm up to about 4TB of total storage, 1TB of which is SSD. I'll never buy another HDD again, though. Probably going to add another 1TB 850 Pro here, soon. Go [H] or go home.
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I have over 40TB in drive space and ofcourse many of those are HDD. So even though I have 6 SSD's in my box I'm not "hard" because I have large HDD's for deep storage. lol... comedic.
 
Youn said:
What exactly is a 4K texture versus 1080p texture? I get what they're trying to say, one is simply higher res, but is there an actual technical property to it, like the resolution of a texture at a certain distance from the camera? Are textures in RAGE considered 240p while procedural textures are infinite?
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Honestly not sure.. makes no sense since you can definitely see the difference from a 256x256 texture vs something 1024x1024+. I think he's saying that having 4K textures on a 1080p monitor would be pointless when that's not true at all.

Also link to full article is broken.
 
I don't understand why they don't move to a thumb drive system if the game is that big. Instead of disk or bluray (which I would prefer at this point) put it in a thumb drive, have it Connect to "service of your choice on install" (ie steam) and install Off the thumb drive? A 64 go thumb drive is cheap these days but even so I would pay an extra 10$ to have it on a thumb drive instead of download that takes me days.
 
who uses uncompressed audio in games? I've only seen mp3 or ogg that's been embedded.
The reason it's large is because they can. They've never been worried about space on pcs.
The issue isn't the game sizes, it's the ISP limitations. Get better internets and this is a non issue.
 
Youn said:
What exactly is a 4K texture versus 1080p texture? I get what they're trying to say, one is simply higher res, but is there an actual technical property to it, like the resolution of a texture at a certain distance from the camera? Are textures in RAGE considered 240p while procedural textures are infinite?
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Well to have a 4K texture you need to store all the information for all those extra pixels. More info, more space required.
 
NickJames said:
Wouldn't be a problem if the fucking ISPs didn't put artificial limits on our services.
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Completely agree.

And not only is the size of the game the issue, but the download speed as well. I don't like having to queue a download overnight. And some of us live in areas where the fastest internet available is quite pokey because the big telecoms see no value in laying infrastructure but at the same time actively prevent others from doing so.
 
azuza001 said:
I don't understand why they don't move to a thumb drive system if the game is that big. Instead of disk or bluray (which I would prefer at this point) put it in a thumb drive, have it Connect to "service of your choice on install" (ie steam) and install Off the thumb drive? A 64 go thumb drive is cheap these days but even so I would pay an extra 10$ to have it on a thumb drive instead of download that takes me days.
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High speed internet is becoming the norm and I prefer game developers put pressure on ISPs by increasing the average rate of data consumption among consumers.
 
I do recall the days of entire games coming on a few 1.44mb floppies. Uncompressed textures and audio files can be pretty massive. It does seem companies don't care about how much space they take up anymore. This is actually why I have so many SSD's in my box. I game off of SSD's and the games are getting so huge that I have 6 SSD's now. I can say that this is getting out of hand abit but EA etc will just never care. Even my PS4 has a 2TB drive in it now so I can play my library.
 
WorldExclusive said:
OK that's stupid. You paid for it.
Maybe I should have told the dealership to keep the backseats in my car because no one rides back there.
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I wish like that option. I don't care about multiplayer. It's not like you won't be able to download the other part later. Also a lot of people don't care for single player and jump straight to the online part.
 
Vader1975 said:
I do recall the days of entire games coming on a few 1.44mb floppies. Uncompressed textures and audio files can be pretty massive. It does seem companies don't care about how much space they take up anymore. This is actually why I have so many SSD's in my box. I game off of SSD's and the games are getting so huge that I have 6 SSD's now. I can say that this is getting out of hand abit but EA etc will just never care. Even my PS4 has a 2TB drive in it now so I can play my library.
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My first PC had a 5.25" floppy drive. I remember buying games that would come on those discs, right on the edge of the PC gaming industry switching over to the smaller disks. Those were certainly interesting times.
 
I hate to admit it, and I'm definitely not advocating it... but this is where a lot of pirate groups excel. They strip away the languages, selective downloads, etc. I've seen 60GB games become 20GB after compression, selective download, etc. NO reason game companies can't offer these things themselves.
 
No amount of development effort can change a 40GB game into an "easy to download" 1GB game, so project managers aren't going to spend their limited development resources on this. And no one is going to not download a game that's 40GB instead of 30GB, which might be a realistic size improvement achievement.

Reducing download size is something everyone thinks they care about, but in reality, they don't care about. It doesn't affect their decision to buy the game or not in terms of what is realistically achievable for a given game.
 
EODetroit said:
No amount of development effort can change a 40GB game into an "easy to download" 1GB game, so project managers aren't going to spend their limited development resources on this. And no one is going to not download a game that's 40GB instead of 30GB, which might be a realistic size improvement achievement.

Reducing download size is something everyone thinks they care about, but in reality, they don't care about. It doesn't affect their decision to buy the game or not in terms of what is realistically achievable for a given game.
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I agree, it would be nice if they would shrink games/give download options, but unless people start speaking with their wallet, things will not change.
 
Some new games take me 3 days + to download with the need to pause to stream video or work. I used to order the disks from Amazon to save time but the last game I bought still had a 20GB download even with the install media. It would be awesome if Walmart or the like could have a game dispensary. Connect your USB storage device into a machine and it transfers your game to it. When games get up into the 100GB range I'm not sure what I'm going to do. It's going to be a full week of downloading and a ton of micromanaging the download speed to keep the rest of our internet needs functioning.
 
EODetroit said:
No amount of development effort can change a 40GB game into an "easy to download" 1GB game, so project managers aren't going to spend their limited development resources on this. And no one is going to not download a game that's 40GB instead of 30GB, which might be a realistic size improvement achievement.

Reducing download size is something everyone thinks they care about, but in reality, they don't care about. It doesn't affect their decision to buy the game or not in terms of what is realistically achievable for a given game.
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Wait until every ISP has caps in place that barely let you download 1 or 2 games worth of data a month and charge an arm and a leg (and maybe a left nut) for overages, then I think people will care a hell of a lot more. No one is going to want to pay $40-60 for a game, then get stuck with an overage fee of maybe half that again if they went over their cap to download it.

I said a long time ago that once people got hooked on digital copies of everything that ISP's would start capping and eventually move to per byte billing. Slowly but surely, that's the way it seems to be going. When it comes to your internet connection, the only thing 'Unlimited' refers to now is how many ways they are going to find to take money from you.
 
Only one way to change the current status quo: contact the developer/publishers and let them know there's an issue. Point them to the PC Gamer article to read.
Otherwise we're just spitting in the wind.
 
I have 18TB of storage on my puter, i'm keeping everything installed and all possible options available in case I need to play offline.
 
This problem would end if the final pre-release test before a game or any software was for a CEO to do a test install using the ISP download speed that matches what someone at the bottom 25% has. When the CEO has to endure hours/days? of downloading only to find out that there is a new patch so more hours of downloading, the new development managers would start optimizing space requirements.
 
I can throw money at the problem and get more storage space, extra SSDs, whatever. I can't get any faster internet where I live though, and that's the problem IMO. If I want to play a new game Friday, I better start downloading it on Wednesday. And hope there's no 10GB Day 1 patch, or I won't be playing at all until Saturday.
 
NickJames said:
Wouldn't be a problem if the fucking ISPs didn't put artificial limits on our services.
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Only part of the problem. Why spend time downloading 12-15GB of languages you never want to listen to? Especially with SSDs being so tiny. I have always wondered why Steam does not give such an option when downloading. Extra audio languages are a big one, because they're really unnecessary for the majority of people and take up large amounts of space. I only speak English , so I have no need for the extras. Even people who speak a few different languages likely don't speak all 9 or so of the major included languages.

Zepher said:
4 of my larger games take up 250GB on my SSD,
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Same. I was looking to save space on my new 750GB MX300 SSD. I am using roughly half of it. Looking through the drive, I only have around 6 games installed. Only one of which I stopped playing, Just Cause 3. I can re-download whenever I get the DLC.

The rest?

ArmA 3 + Mods - 29GB
BF4 - 69GB or so
BF1 - 41GB or so
DCS World - 37GB
DCS World Open Alpha - 55GB
Armored Warfare - 24GB

Uninstalled Watch Dogs 2 as I was done with it. Still sitting at roughly half the space of 750GB used between those few games. And yes, I do play all of these games regularly.
 
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2 BD roms are perfectly resonable, heck even 4 single layer for 100GB is reasonable.
Don't see the problem.
ISP caps are crap none the less.
 
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