My mind is blown by how much hard drive space games require

[JeffMD]

This thread blows my mind, mr. obvious, please save me. -_-

 

[Necc]

True, you got a point there. Technology might not be improving as fast as we wish. But 10 years is a long time.

In 10 years time, many people will have 1 Gbps fiber to their homes. With 1 Gbps, it will take only ~2.5 hours to download 1 TeraByte.

In 10 years time? we already have "almost" 1 Gbps internet in europe with no cap, not bragging but idon't understand how you guy's deal with caps.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

The vast majority of the space is spent on high resolution textures and high quality audio, the size of games is increasing because we can realistically load/stream these files into memory and process them at max quality with modern GPUs. As the capabilities of GPUs get better and HDD space continues to grow we'll continue to see games increase in size, it's just normal. Thankfully bandwidth is also following, Virgin Media have just enabled 200Mbit in my area, even at 152mbit these sizes of games can be downloaded in ~2 hours.

 

[Gryz]

In 10 years time? we already have "almost" 1 Gbps internet in europe with no cap, not bragging but idon't understand how you guy's deal with caps.

I am in Europe. That is why I poked fun at the Americans with their "capitalistic" infrastructure. They get what they deserve.

Yes, there are a few people in Europe with 1 Gbps connections. However, there are still very few of them. First of all, everybody needs to get fiber to their homes. Old phone copper-wires will never support 1 Gbps. Nor will cable-plants with copper coax cables. You need fiber to the home. It will take a while before half the people in Europe have fiber. My (wild) guess: at least 10 years. That's why I said it will take 10 years for us to go from "a few people have 1 Gbps" to "many people will have 1 Gbps".

 

[StinkyPinky]

Meanwhile outside of the US that is a pipe dream. Over here in Australia I can pull down 1.6MB/s. Period. Give or take 10%. And now stupid game devs are only putting part of the games on DVDs and you still have to download fat pieces. I finished the Witcher III a few months back (bought on DVD). Now with all the patches and Hearts of Stone its 20GB to update. I gave up. FO4 alone is just a ~24GB download (for now). And most of that space is redundant crap. What high res textures? And doesn't audio compress well? I prefer things hard copy and offline and yet everything seems to be reversing away from that. And why? The center of the world isn't the US.

May be a pipe dream in Australia, but here in New Zealand I pay $79 NZD for unlimited 100/20 internet. I downloaded Fallout 4 in less than an hour. I can get 200/20 for $99 if i wanted, and parts of NZ offer 1 gbit for around $109 month.

 

[sandorski]

I remember when games were kilobytes in size.

 

[freeskier93]

I am in Europe. That is why I poked fun at the Americans with their "capitalistic" infrastructure. They get what they deserve.

Yes, there are a few people in Europe with 1 Gbps connections. However, there are still very few of them. First of all, everybody needs to get fiber to their homes. Old phone copper-wires will never support 1 Gbps. Nor will cable-plants with copper coax cables. You need fiber to the home. It will take a while before half the people in Europe have fiber. My (wild) guess: at least 10 years. That's why I said it will take 10 years for us to go from "a few people have 1 Gbps" to "many people will have 1 Gbps".

I don't know what this "capitalistic infrastructure" you speak of is, we get our internet from the city.

10 years sounds about right if it's left up to the ISPs. I think cities offering internet will start becoming more popular though which should speed things up. Problem is in many places there are laws regarding this, but once those laws are repealed cities can move fast. We repealed those laws a couple years ago in Longmont and fiber roll out will be done by end of 2016, and that's fiber straight to the house for anyone who signs up.

 

[balloonshark]

50/5 Mbps 250GB cap
75/7.5 Mbps 350GB cap
100/7.5 Mbps 400GB cap

This is what my isp offers in my area. You can buy 50GB more bandwidth for $10. Or I can upgrade from 50 to 75Mbps for $10 a month.

Our caps are here to stay because they have a monopoly and they are profiting from the caps. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...Have-Become-Significant-Revenue-Stream-135586

 

[flexy]

50GB game took me 20mins today. 300/30Mib fiber, Spain.
That being said, this is one of the few times where I actually noticed that I have 300MiB/s (they upgraded us from 100MB a few weeks ago), otherwise I can do very fine with 100MiB/s...and if I had the option I'd actually downgrade to 100Mb again for €15 or so less. (Paying €60 currently/month with unlimited phone, cable etc.. which we don't need since we don't watch TV). Whether 50GB takes...say...20mins or an hour...TBH I can smoke that in a pipe..doesn't really matter.

Cap? Of course not. We're living in the free world where "socialism" (lol) reigns and where we wouldn't tolerate tyranny by Comcast or similar scammers.

 

[alcoholbob]

I am in Europe. That is why I poked fun at the Americans with their "capitalistic" infrastructure. They get what they deserve.

Yes, there are a few people in Europe with 1 Gbps connections. However, there are still very few of them. First of all, everybody needs to get fiber to their homes. Old phone copper-wires will never support 1 Gbps. Nor will cable-plants with copper coax cables. You need fiber to the home. It will take a while before half the people in Europe have fiber. My (wild) guess: at least 10 years. That's why I said it will take 10 years for us to go from "a few people have 1 Gbps" to "many people will have 1 Gbps".

Americans only reflexively use the word capitalism as if they still understand what that means. After America's involvement in WWII resulted in the massive government infrastructure that was maintained since has long since destroyed any figment of capitalism. You don't go from ~45% of your of workforce in manufacturing goods and value-added services pre-war to today 4% and declining and still call yourself a capitalist nation if you have no capital. The only thing propping up the American empire at this point is the artificial demand for dollars worldwide from the petrodollar and the US military's defense of oil monarchies. If you don't make anything to trade and consume everything other people make (honest settlement of trade) the only way the system continues is through force.

Europe is far more capitalist than the U.S. at this point. I love how people scream socialism when people bring up Europe whereas at this point America is the biggest recipient of socialist welfare from the rest of the world today while everyone else is practicing far more capitalist principles.

 

[shortylickens]

DUDE!

Fallout 4 would have been like 5 DVD's!!!

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I am in Europe. That is why I poked fun at the Americans with their "capitalistic" infrastructure. They get what they deserve.

Yes, there are a few people in Europe with 1 Gbps connections. However, there are still very few of them. First of all, everybody needs to get fiber to their homes. Old phone copper-wires will never support 1 Gbps. Nor will cable-plants with copper coax cables. You need fiber to the home. It will take a while before half the people in Europe have fiber. My (wild) guess: at least 10 years. That's why I said it will take 10 years for us to go from "a few people have 1 Gbps" to "many people will have 1 Gbps".

What are you on about, the americans don't have a capitalistic infrastructure, the government stepped in the regulate telecomms, it used to be hugely varied and capitalistic but that all went away pretty much since WW2 where government stepped in and took over.

I'm in the UK where VM are rolling out DOCSIS3 and have already done trials up to 300mbit on copper coax, somewhat faster than the traditional phone lines that right now are struggling to hit even 100mbit for most people. However both BT and VM have cabled fibre from the exchange (typically 1 per town and several per city) to the cabinet (cabs are typically 1 per street), so a huge amount of the cabling is now fibre, it's just the last leg from the cab to the home which is stopping full FTTH

Capitalism is working quite nicely in most cases, lots of people do not have fibre, not because it's not available but because it's simply too expensive. I've rolled out dedicated fibre installs to all the offices I've setup (I'm Head of IT and previously a systems administrator) and in the UK most major cities and commercial areas will support FTTH/FTTP, it's simply a case of paying for it.

Besides right now there's no significant demand for more than 300mbit to the home, that's a seriously fast connection for regular home use.

 

[XiandreX]

You can copy the game folder to an other drive,most games will keep running just fine or you can copy them back to ssd whenever you want.

My 3TB WD Red is almost full as is my 1TB external and so is my 500G blue.. so yeah if money wasn't an issue this would work .. but alas Electronics are expensive here.
A 3TB Red drive is around $140 here, our cost of living is high,and our income is no where near the US.

 

[Anubis]

Online Gaming (MMO/MMORPG)

.

this actually does not use that much data
Simply playing WoW for ~4 hours uses less then 1 GB of data - I was curious and tethered to my phone and watched it

 

[KMFJD]

this actually does not use that much data
Simply playing WoW for ~4 hours uses less then 1 GB of data - I was curious and tethered to my phone and watched it

I was able to 5 box WoW and it was using about 70Kbps combined

 

[BFG10K]

Well what can you do,1080/FullHD needs big clean textures to make it look good, no way around that.

It's nothing to do with the textures. The Call of Duty games for example are getting bigger and bigger but the texture quality is actually getting worse.

I think it's those bullsh*t cut-scenes during gameplay and load screens. They're probably being done in 4K now.

 

[JeffMD]

DUDE!

Fallout 4 would have been like 5 DVD's!!!

3 dual layers most likely. gta was 7. What sucks more is dual layer dvds only get read at like 4x even by the fastest dvd drives, so even on a monster system a disc install takes 1.5 hours.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

So I became curious. I used a free utility called SpaceSniffer to graph out the folders on my hard drive, and see which of my PC games were consuming the most space.

Thanks for the link. I'd never heard of that program before.

 

[ibex333]

Well, I just want to chime in and say that this is NOT ok. The fact that storage is getting cheaper these days doesn't help the issue in any way IMO.

First of all, most of us will want to put our games on an SSD and those are NOT cheap relative to their size. If you got games that each take up around 80GB, a 256GB SSD will fill up very quickly. And second, if you store your games on spinning disks, with a large file you have an issue where thjis large file takes longer to install, delete, etc when needed. That is not that horrible or terrible in the grand scheme of things, but it's annoying, and should not be.

Lazy developers, who don't want to do the extra work I say. People in general don't want to go that extra mile to make life a little better for someone else. Everyone wants to get paid, no one wants to actually work for that money. Only enough to look good to the boss. Cant hardly blame them. Everyone's motto is "Don't work hard! Hardly work!".

Supply and demand. If people would boycott such games and just not buy them, the devs would tone down on the system requirements, but because everyone says "Shut up and take my money!" when a new game come out, this keeps going on.

Me? I just don't play games where I have a problem with system requirements. Plenty of other good games out there.

 

[skipsneeky2]

LOL i told my cousin to buy GTA V on dvd cause a 60+gb game on my connection is a 18 hour download.

Quite the spectacle seeing just how many dvds it requires for a full installation.You realize your waiting a eternity for the dvd-rom to install the game.Such a slow pos the dvd-rom these days.Just offer the game on a thumb drive ffs.