The crazy size of today's games...

[CadetStimpy]

Since we were on the topic of historic consoles, I recalled another message I sent out last Summer after doing a little research (and a little math): Remember the Atari 2600? There were nearly 470 games for that system. Being the games were quite simple (and small) back then, the total size of all those games together, was only about 1.9Mb. There’s a new game out now called Wolfenstein: The New Order, and it’s a whopping 43.65Gb. That one game is nearly 23,000 times larger than all the Atari games combined! Additionally, you’d need 10 DVD’s (single-layer), or over 60 CD’s for Wolfenstein. I wonder how insane it'll be in another few decades. I love it, though! I just hope "Star Trek" comes before "Skynet".

[SentaiBrad]

CadetStimpy said Since we were on the topic of historic consoles, I recalled another message I sent out last Summer after doing a little research (and a little math): Remember the Atari 2600? There were nearly 470 games for that system. Being the games were quite simple (and small) back then, the total size of all those games together, was only about 1.9Mb. There’s a new game out now called Wolfenstein: The New Order, and it’s a whopping 43.65Gb. That one game is nearly 23,000 times larger than all the Atari games combined! Additionally, you’d need 10 DVD’s (single-layer), or over 60 CD’s for Wolfenstein. I wonder how insane it'll be in another few decades. I love it, though! I just hope "Star Trek" comes before "Skynet".

Well as technology advances, storage gets cheaper, there is less of an emphasis on needing to make your game fit on a 64mb cart (N64... and that was big mostly reserved for Starcraft 64 and RE2) or a 4mb cart (NES). Wolfenstein would fit on 5 DVD's today and I think GTA5 shipped for PC as a 7 disc set? That's just dumb to do that. That costs way too much money. It's a multitude of factors honestly. Game engines are more robust, that takes up more space. Textures and audio are way more beautiful and crisp, so the better quality and fidelity just takes up more space. Not to mention, less compression. Why over compress when you don't need to save all that space? Consoles are always somewhat a step behind computers, but now that these consoles are more like computers, they offer more freedom for the developers and everything other technical advance. They can start doing this on a much wider scale. Turn of the console generation saw these gigantic games. Hell, FF13 was 3 discs on 360, and 720p only cut-scenes. My Star Ocean on 360 was 4 discs. All dual-layer. It's surprising because games didn't get that much bigger between generations. 700mb per disc x1-4 for PS1. 4.9GB per single-layer x1-2 for PS2, and 8.9GB for dual layer, but that was some games and after several years. 360 still used 4.9 and 8.9GB DVD's and PS3 used 25GB blu-ray's which isn't too far off 2-3 8.9GB DVD's which the 360 used on a lot of games. The jump's haven't been to drastic, but a generally speaking a developer creates a game to the lowest common denominator and scales up. Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag is a good example. Fun game, but the same game from PS3 -> PS4, just more pretty. Now that games are being developed for the new lowest common denominator the stakes have been risen... except that we;re no longer held down by disc size but instead HDD sizes. Which like I said, year over year get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. You can change the HDD on your PS4 as long as it meets the size and min. RPM requirements. I think some people have had success even putting SSD's in there. So yea... you could fit the entire NES, FDS, Sega Master System, Atari 2400, 3200 and 5200 libraries on a single DVD but the games have generally improved significantly.

[CadetStimpy]

Yeah, many 'experts' are predicting the demise of the CD/DVD format in well under a decade. It's all gonna be downloading and streaming in the future (well, I suppose it's mostly that already). I won't be able to give-away my sizable DVD collection before long. Who's gonna wanna get off the couch to place a disc in a machine?

[CliveBarker]

Star Citizen will be 100+GB!

[CadetStimpy]

100+GB? Yikes! Where will it all end? I suppose it never will - why would it?

[SentaiBrad]

CadetStimpy said 100+GB? Yikes! Where will it all end? I suppose it never will - why would it?

They kept making money. So one of the stretch goals if I remember correctly was to be able to make 4k textures etc. So I assume they have 1-3 sets of textures, they apparently have a big story and its in space, so a lot of... space. Lots of NPC's, ships, planets etc etc. So all of that sound. Uncompressed sound and textures do take up a lot of space, especially in space.

[CadetStimpy]

I wonder how large the games are for that Oculus Rift VR thing? It seems as if, to me, Mr. Layperson, they would need to be really large. But, maybe they just do it with 'graphics trickery'. Anyone know how large the games are for that thing?

[SentaiBrad]

CadetStimpy said I wonder how large the games are for that Oculus Rift VR thing? It seems as if, to me, Mr. Layperson, they would need to be really large. But, maybe they just do it with 'graphics trickery'. Anyone know how large the games are for that thing?

They don't necessarily need to be larger, but the computers to run them need to be beefier. They don't need two sets of textures, but they produce the image twice at slightly altered locations. They should theoretically grow at the same pace games now do, except that they don't generally need to play to the lowest common denominator. Except for the Morpheus, and even then it's not going to go to PC. They also don't need to worry about shipping on discs, I don't think they're going that route.