stryxo returns after nearly 2 months to rant about the absurd filesizes of modern AAA video games.

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Part of the script until i hit word limit:
Is this not ridiculous to anyone else? We are on the 9th generation of consoles, NINTH, and one of the biggest hangups I have to deal with is that 667gb of usable, default storage, all of a sudden, isn’t that much. Go back a couple decades and I’m 90% sure I could fit the entire playstation 2 line up on 667 gigabytes. Yet in 2024 I get to download Red Dead Redemption 2, Fifa 23, the Call of Duty HQ hub thing or whatever it is, FF7 Rebirth, and the Demon Souls remake. Five whole games, and the thought that I’d want to add Elden Ring on top of this means I’ll only have 7 free gigabytes of space to, play bomb rush cyberfunk, or balatro. If I want to play skyrim, I’ll have to uninstall one of these games, or I’m encouraged to spend 90 dollars on a special edition storage upgrade so that I won’t have to worry about this issue.

I can’t even rely on game discs anymore because some of them are straight up just keys for a digital download nowadays, which can only make me feel a certain type of way for deciding to spend an extra 100 dollars on a disc drive.

Also just to preface this video, while doing research for all the file sizes for these games, not only are their discrepancies between PC and Consoles for the same game, but some people just have varying install sizes? I know some games are updated after the fact to optimize storage, otherwise I don’t know. I saw nearly 10 different accurate file sizes for just one game, and I can only imagine why, so if I happen to get the exact gigabyte number of a game wrong, apologies. Just imagine the numbers I say are a general amount.

Anyways it’s not like i’m exactly breaking ground by talking about this, it’s no secret that the file sizes for certain AAA games are absolutely massive now. Nearly every other month you see a brand new headline for an article by PC Gamer, Kotaku, or IGN talking about how the next call of duty, or the next big triple AAA game set to come out is some absurd number of gigabytes. And everyone can tell it’s absurd, to the point that it is a real, genuine conspiracy big developers like Activision are purposefully bloating the size of their live service games so you’re less likely to free up space on your drive to play something else. At a certain point I can’t even blame them, because here’s Modern Warfare 2019, and here’s Modern Warfare 2020(3). On the left is a 159 gigabyte game, on the right is a 240 gigabyte game. 81 gigabytes of difference.

You’re probably wondering how any of this possibly came to happen, and to answer that we need to back up a bit, a bit further, little bit- WOAH, TOO FAR, FORWARD, okay, perfect, 1996. Let’s take a look at the size of some N64 games, because when this console came out, these cartridges could hold up to a maximum of 64mb of data. Some games like Dr. Mario 64 were put on carts that could only hold 4mb of data, which looking at gameplay of this yeah that tracks. Some other games were bigger, like Super Mario 64 coming in at 6mb, or Starfox 64 at 10mb. Only a few games were actually put on the 64mb carts, like Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Paper Mario, Pokemon Stadium 2, and Resident Evil 2.

Jumping forward just 5 years, the GameCube comes out and introduces it’s own specialized format of mini DVD’s that can hold ~1.5gb of data. StarFox Assault comes in at a whopping 1.3gb in size, and Super Mario Sunshine comes in at 1.35gb in size. For the StarFox franchise, that’s a 129x increase in file size in just five years, and for the Mario franchise, it’s an even larger 224x increase in size, which sounds absurd, because it is. Taking a look at it visually really puts it into perspective, with each dot representing one megabyte. Super Mario 64 is 6mb, and Super Mario Sunshine is 1350 megabytes.

The rate of change we’re working with is like if Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018 and people were shocked about a 150gb file size, then 5 years later Red Dead Redemption 3 came out and was 33 Terabytes.