The audacity!

105 comments

I was shocked to find out that Balatro was like 80 MB to download. You don't need million-poly models and 8k textures to make an really good game. Granted, yeah it's a 2D game, but it's a beautifully-presented one.
- Animal Well has a 35mb install according to Steam.
  
  Games like that have nothing to prove. The product speaks for itself.
  Meanwhile, games that take up 300gb of your disk often do this purposefully. In the case of console games, they know it will monopolize your system. The game usually isn’t even enjoyable, but it’s too big to delete randomly, so you gaslight yourself into committing to it
  
  Animal Well is a staggering work of art on multiple fronts, not least of which is the code golf required to keep its size so small. Incredible game.
- whatever you do, don't look into its code.
  It's basically a single lua file with more if/else/switch nesting than god intended
  (unless it was refactored in the last couple months)
  
  Why not? On the same way you don't need amazing art to make a fun game, you don't need amazing code either. If the game is fun then it's a success.
  
  Apparently Undertale works this way as well. All of its dialog is one massive switch statement.
  
  Yeah a lot of games have shit code and always have. Real time strategy "ai" is especially egregious if I remember right.
  
  If it works it works.
- Im surprised it's that much given how simple the graphics are.
  
  Liibraries with their dependencies can take up a fair bit of that space easily these days. I dunno how many would be used in a game like that but that'd be my guess for the space needed.
  
  Going against the grain here but I'd like to see a mod or DLC that changes pixel-art to vector art or something. Or maybe something like Windows 7 Solitaire?🤞
- Apparently most of that file size comes from localisation requirements too.

I redownloaded Stardew Valley last night and was amazed to find it's still less than a Gigabyte.
I know it's not the same as a hyperrealistic 3D game, but I'm still amazed at how much stuff he keeps adding, but it hasn't even scratched a GB.
- Pixel art is very space efficient. Thats how pixel art originally came about, back when computers/consoles/cabinets didn't have memory for bigger textures, or the capability to even display the full resolution and colour palette of the monitor/tv within the time of one frame.
  
  is that why Minecraft is so popular?
- Hehe yeah, the whole game is the size of one objects collection of textures in some other games.

Valheim, a massive open world filled with interesting monsters and beautiful stylistic graphics is 1gb
- to be fair, the 4k textures etc take up most of the space in large 3d games. valheim has a low poly and low quality textures style with a lot of repeats. it only looks good thanks to lighting.
  with such a design choice you have an unfair advantage over photorealism and large variety.
  we should however compare different games of the same style. did they use the 8k ulta detailed Hamburger models or did they actually think about Ressource and space management ?
  
  It's also, as tons of people have said about the Arkham series, about art style. The Valheim style looks really good because they have incredible artists working on the game.
  Just like Arkham Knight is still one of the best looking games I've ever seen even though it's almost 9 years old, Valheim will still probably look just as good the same amount of time later.
  
  Well we had to use the 10k triangle toothbrush model, no two ways about it! (/s/)
- I agree. We're not the first ones to point it out, but theres a strong argument to be made for graphical style over graphical fidelity. Working to achieve a particular stylised choice tends to give a visual medium greater longevity.
  There's a reason why people remember details about Jurassic Park over something like Avatar; or Star Fox over the latest Call of Duty.
  Technology has made some things look better over the years, but the things that really get remembered visually are the style choices.
  Just because one game takes up a quarter of your hard drive doesn't make it more impressive than a sub 1 GB game.
  
  That and with stylized graphics you stand a much greater chance of being able to see just what the hell is happening on the screen.
- The sun shining through the mist in the forests is incredibly atmospheric..
  The models may look like they've escaped from a PS1 game, but it knows where it needs the graphical shit.

Downloaded factorio yesterday at a wopping ~1.5 gig
What game is this?
Have noticed western devs typically can't reduce file size for shit. Something like killing floor 2 is 97 gigs and elden ring (last i looked) was under 50
- In relation to Western devs, I think this is essentially just that it's easy to just pile in more assets, but it can be tricky slimming down again, because you need to be certain that something really isn't used before removing it. So many games never get around to the slimming down part, also because it isn't really directly profitable to them...
  I will highlight 1 case though. Hitman 2 was 149 gig, and included the levels for Hitman 1 and 2. But Hitman 3 was slimmed down to 60 gigs while including all of the content from Hitman 1, 2, and 3.
- Factorio with Space Age is 4 GB
  
  Damn that's like nothing.
  Have not gotten space age yet
- My guess would be cod
- TBF Maple story is 40gb today. The game is 2d.

Game's size depends on many factors. Besides devs' laziness or the abundance of inique assets and dupes, I had a fun ride with Vermintide 2 whose devs were able to cut game's size from 100gb+ to 60gb+ at once because they added all incrimental updates as additional archives and also prefered to have all assets for one level in one place even if they are shared, so it grew out of proportion over the years before they decided to cause a complete asset restructurement and dublicate hunt before the major update. It made players redownload big chunks of the game but resulted in a way less terrifying size to those players they wanted to start it or return into.

When games get this big it merely ensures that they get uninstalled the moment I lose a bit of interest.
- For me it ensures I don't install them in the first place and just don't buy the game
- On the + side, this keep HDD sales up, which would otherwise have dropped low enough for most consumer facing markets to shut down long before the rise of home made NAS devices

Sekiro is only 13GB and I think that's very neat
- I'm sorry, but I just need to come out and say it.
  Sekiro is a good game.
  
  You absolute fools, I have been lying the whole time!
  It's a great game.

8gb is probably a bit too small for most photorealistic style games at maximum settings, but maybe they should introduce optional games asset support to steam. No point downloading the full resolution textures if you're playing on low texture settings.
- Yeah, alot of games in their own launchers have that option, but bought through steam don't, steam needs a clean way of supporting multiple install formats, I guess.
  
  They do it through the dlc mechanism just fine. Halo is an example of this.

What 8GB. Some of the best games ever fit in a floppy disk (a real life save icon for the gen z people around here).
- A floppy? How many copies of kkreiger do you need?
  
  I need the rest of the space for my humongous demos collection.
- Transport Tycoon.
  Although that may have been 3 floppies.
- Lmao, I didn't know someone could be condescending about floppy disc's, but here we are.
  
  It's a joke and I didn't intend it to be condescending.
- Back in high school i had a floppy with an NES emulator and several games. Was able to play nes game on school computers. Never got caught doing that lol

What's that FPS someone made to be as small of a file as possible? It's like a Quake rip-off, but the game runs as a single executable and is small enough to barely take up the space of a floppy disk (like just a few kilobytes)?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
  
  Hell yeah :D
- Doom
  (/s)

There are plenty of 8GB games, we need to lower our expectations.
you don't get 4k with matching textures and pre-lit levels the size of texas for free.
Go back to 8GB and 3-4 year releases
- So what you're saying is that we need more ray traced games. Don't have to waste a bunch of space pre-baking lighting when it's calculated in realtime!
  
  That helps. We are heading that way. But as a whole we're just chasing the prettiest most expensive graphics. Nobody gives a damn how the game plays or how it performs. Or demanding huge worlds, Hi-Rez, high refresh rate, and then bitching about it.

I miss the days when you could choose to stream most of the large assets directly from the CD, because taking up 600MB on your hard drive was too much to ask for.
- I don’t miss those loading times though; for better or worse, SSDs have changed the game (no pun intended).

Animal Well is like, 40Mb
- It's great though. Every time I figure something out in that game I feel like the greatest MFer in the universe, and the rest of the time there are cute animals. And it was made by a single unhinged man. Top shelf, game of the decade.

This is how I felt with bg3. Like I know there's a lot of little assets for every bookshelf and basket type you have to click on incessantly, but...150GB for a third person isometric? Is every book ready for rendering at 8k or something?
- It's not isometric though, the camera can be controlled, zoomed in/out/rotated, and it has a full 3d world. And it's huuuuge. Don't get me wrong, I don't think any game should be that large, but BG3 has at least some justification for it.
  
  I don't even think the world is that big. There's just a lot in it.
  I did try to google the size of the map, but got a horseshit AI slop answer that wasn't based on any kind of reality.
- I think it's probably the gargantuan amounts of super hi definition audio that do BG3.
- it's a game with an insane amount of dialog and narration, with branching stories. that's a lot of audio. people underestimate how much voice acting adds to the size.
  also this is not a old-school isometric game with prerendered assets converted to 2d backgrounds and sprites; it's fully 3d, and it uses closeup angles for dialog and cut scenes so the textures should be geared towards that while regular isometric games can get away with lower textures because they keep the camera distant from the assets at all times.
- Is it maybe voice files etc for all the potential branching storylines and conversations that can happen? It's such a spiderweb of branching storylines that I'd imagine it can take up a fair whack but I genuinely dont know jack shit, just spitballing.
  
  it definitely is significant. that game has insane amounts of voice work and voice audio takes a lot of space. it used to be a huge problem with physical media

No point in playing that game lmao

Reject modernity, Return to Zork
- But I don't particularly feel like being eaten by a Grue.

They do. I am currently playing CDDA with a folder at 987MB, most of that is the save folder at 523MB. You should stop buying games that are so large if you don't like it.

ARK?

Now give it to me in 3.5" floppy disks.
- I wonder if we put serious effort into it how many GB we could fit on 3.5" media
  
  Some of the biggest archives around are on magnetic tape if I remember right.
  
  Let's see.... 1.44MB per floppy... carry the two....uhhh 0.14% of a GB, sir.