Featured Image Credit: Activision/Sony
Topics: PC
PC gamers are already sick of 100GB download sizes for video games and they’re not happy about it.
Video games that have large file sizes are nothing new, especially to console gamers. For years we’ve had to make do with excessive download sizes taking up a large chunk of our hard drive space. That’s unless we’re prepared to fork out for not-so-cheap SSD hard drives.
For example, the Call of Duty series is amongst the largest culprits with the latest entry, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II taking up over 153GB on PlayStation 5. Elsewhere on my strained PS5 hard drive, Horizon Forbidden West takes up 112.7GB (with Burning Shores), as well as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla taking up 122.7GB with added expansions and DLC.
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The most recent chunky culprit on console is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor demanding a whopping 148.2GB for a single player game with no expansions at the time of writing. It’s quite apparent that Jedi: Survivor is poorly optimised and some will be hoping that it will take the lead of AC: Valhalla which has reduced in size by 40GB since it launched.
Unfortunately, PC gamers are also not exempt from over-indulgent storage requirements with the likes of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare exceeding 200GB, Destiny 2 pushing the 150GB barrier and following in the shoes of its console counterpart, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor also amassing over 150GB.
On the topic of the common trend of most modern AAA PC games taking up a minimum of 100GB, PC gamers on Reddit had plenty to say and some with viable solutions on how to tackle the issue.
“Sometimes it’s poor optimisation. AC Valhalla reduced its file size by 40% by optimising the textures folders properly etc turns out they were duplicating assets in multiple folders instead of them all drawing from the same folder,” said gogul1980.
“Also the multiple audio files for different languages can take up a lot of space. They could reduce folder sizes by allowing you to choose what language you want and rejecting the rest. They could even do one better by allowing you to only download the textures you want, 4K, 2K or HD. It could save you hours of bandwidth.”
“To me, it's not storage that's the issue, it's the time to download if you are unfortunate enough to not have fast internet,” exclaimed bgroon, which seems to be a very common trend on the thread.
“Is upon us” lol. Are we pretending this didn’t already happen years ago?” joked
ElRetardio. “I downloaded Shadow of War the other day to give it a try, and boy, taking up 150GB on my SSD is a good way to make me not want to play you at all,” replied Gornub.
“I have a 4TB SSD and a 1TB SSD in my machine. The storage I have isn't the point (although "just buy more storage lol it's so cheap!" isn't a valid argument) because these games aren't good enough to justify the incredibly bloated storage requirements,” continued Gornub. “People justifying having to spend upward of $60+ just to hold a game that will already cost you $60 to $70 at launch is how companies don't care that they make their games like this. Also, a lot of people don't have unlimited data available to them.”
Hopefully, at some point in the near future, developers will find a solution to consistently optimise its games for PC and console, because at this point, there are only so many games players will want to delete at the expense of another.