no i will not dedicate 100+ gigs of ssd space to Bethesda game
it could be the best game ever made for all i care, if you can't respect my drive space, i'm not installing your game
It genuinely feels like cost cutting laziness
I've seen people defend it for stuff like Baldur's Gate 3, going "Well it's a 40+ hour game, that's so much content! Plus voice lines and stuff!"
Mother Fucker, games weren't always like this. Persona 3 was 80+ hours and it was like a gig big. I've spent 3000 hours on EU4, and that's 6 gigs. Ogre Battle 64 is 50+ hours and that's like FOUR MEGABYTES. Why are we allowing games in the past year to not respect our drive space?
I was looking at wipeout 3's files the other day and there's MAYBE 100 megs of actual game data in there, everything else is raw audio tracks and intro videos to fill out 600 megs or so. I think most of the big multi disk JRPGs are similar: miniscule game data and most of it is just video.
So what about modern games? I think most cutscenes are pre rendered now, does the actual 3d asset data take up THAT much space? Is it textures? Is it high quality audio files? What in the world are they doing that games take up so much space?
I would not be surprised if it's marketing at this point. Easiest way to get people to talk about your game is to make it fucking huge.
An unconfirmed rumor/theory is kinda close to that!
If your disk space is all used up by games you're committed to playing for a long period of time (note: not even necessarily like), that means other games don't get added because there's not enough room.
Textures. Well, and sound. But textures.
A 1024 x 1024 texture is 1,048,576 pixels.
A 2048 x 2048 texture is 4,194,304 pixels.
A 4096 x 4096 texture is 16,777,216 pixels
Basically a 4x jump in size each step.
More stuff just having 4k textures as the default basically means a 4x increase in texture disk space. Then add to that shit is so complexity of all these games and incredibly fast loading, it's way harder and way less essential for companies to be efficient with this stuff. Big left over textures, samey textures, unnecessary resolution for some background elements and all that. Even 4k packs for older games are much smaller because the amount of textures are just much less.
So textures that are on average, 4x the size (not that every 4K game has 4K Textures on EVERYTHING but GOD does it still add up) on like way way more assets and it gets huge super fast.
Granted things like Unreal Engine's nanite allowing really unoptimized photoscans with tons and tons of vertex data isn't great either for file size, but I feel like it's still almost always textures and audio.
With audio in particular, uncompressed assets use less RAM and less CPU, and can start playing sooner, since you can basically stream them directly from the storage medium. Audio isn't the biggest part of install size bloat by a long shot, but the way it's implemented in audio is representative of the kind of tradeoffs being made in all other parts of the system design.
There's also the factor of: who's paying for the storage? Nintendo is a standout among AAA publishers for usually having comparatively low game sizes, because they manufacture their own Switch cartridges and anticipate enormous print runs, so they save money by ensuring they can fit into a smaller model. But with a PC game, it's the consumer who pays for the drive, so the developers, having no way to measure whether install size impacts sales, realize no observable benefit from optimizing for storage space, and therefore have no monetary incentive to try.
Modern software development methodologies regard developer effort as the costliest part of the process, since everything that adds complexity to the project not only increases the time that must be spent making it, but also the number of bugs (which are especially expensive to deal with in games) and the risk of the project falling behind or failing altogether. Therefore anything that makes developers' jobs simpler (not the same as easier) is preferred. Profligacy in the management of game assets is tolerated because it means that there's fewer dimensions of optimization for artists to worry about while drawing, fewer systems for programmers to create and maintain, fewer permutations for the build system to contend with, and so forth. All these problems tend to grow exponentially, so at the scale of a AAA video game, even a small decrease in complexity results in a big increase in feasibility.
More broadly, in software in general, the performance efficiency of software has tended to decrease over time. The reason for this is because most newly-made software is for commercial purposes, not for consumers, and in that context it's usually preferable to have something expensive to run sooner than to have something cheap to run later.
There's kind of a 90-10 split, where a small number of big programs manifest the overwhelming majority of the problem. This gets to be really noticeable when you operate a machine that's designed specifically for running those big programs.
Anyway, shit's complicated, but it's this way for systemic reasons, and the systems could be (and, in some places, demonstrably have been) structured differently and produce different results.
