File sizes of triple-A games

Game developers are in a perpetual arms race, competing to release the most technically adept and visually stunning adventures for their fans to devour. Gamers’ desire for more immersive, more epic, more spectacular experiences naturally leads to games that feature…more. But bigger games mean bigger file sizes, and especially for console owners, this presents logistical issues. Internal storage is at a premium, with even the most generous current-gen internal storage drives looking small compared to the size of the triple-A game releases this year.

Did console developers Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo anticipate just how rapidly game file size would explode within their consoles’ lifetimes and the onus this would put on gamers to come up with their own storage solutions? Did computer manufacturers building gaming machines anticipate the extent to which current games would require both superlative storage and speed?

Games are getting bigger across genres

This rapid expansion is not limited to open-world games. Capcom’s PS4, PS5, Xbox and PC remake of the iconic action/survival horror Resident Evil 4 is a hefty 68GB, while its 2021 instalment of the franchise, Resident Evil Village, was only 35GB. Similarly, Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor for PS5, Xbox and PC is 130GB in size, beating its previous instalment Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a slender 43GB, by nearly 100GB.

Even games from genres you wouldn’t expect to need substantial file sizes are getting in on the storage bloat action. Street Fighter 6, the latest in Capcom’s seminal fighting series, is estimated to weigh in at 60GB on PS4, PS5, Xbox and PC, while Street Fighter 5 was just 12.4GB in 2016.

Why are modern games so large?

There are numerous competing opinions as to why games in the PS5 and Xbox S/X era have such gargantuan file sizes. The prevailing opinion is that the electronics industry shift for televisions and monitors from 1080p resolution to 4K resolution has a lot to do with it. Higher resolution screens can display far more detailed textures – four times more detailed, in fact. Game developers want to make use of this greater detail to create more impressive textures for their environmental and character models. Since these textures are more detailed, they take up much more space. Apply this principle to every object in the game, and that adds up to a much bigger game file. While developers do their best to recycle textures, there is a limit to what can be done.

While the amount of work that goes into textures has increased, budgets for games have not increased commensurately. Retail prices for triple-A games have gone up, much to the lamentation of gamers worldwide, but not enough to offset the cost of the additional labour. This has led to what industry insiders identify as another culprit for bloated game files: reduced opportunity for compression. When games were principally distributed by physical media, such as CDs, DVDs and cartridges, there was a clear monetary advantage to reducing the size of the game file, as it meant less expenditure in publishing. These days, barely one in twenty games sold involves physical media, and those that do often still require substantial downloads in order to install data that will support the reading of the disc or game card. While the costs of storing larger game files for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of downloads are significant, they involve much fewer ancillary costs than those of publishing and distribution. There is less of a financial incentive to compress and optimise file size. This, combined with the reduced window of opportunity caused by greater graphical workload restricting available project time for optimisation, means that a sharp increase in game file sizes is unavoidable.

Lastly, though likely a lesser contributor, it is also worth noting that games are building larger and more complex dialogue systems in the quest for greater immersion and interactivity. With audio files increasing in quantity and sound quality, this also has an impact on the file size. To use Starfield as an example, Bethesda released Skyrim in 2012 with approximately 60,000 voiced lines of dialogue. Fallout 4, in 2015, nearly doubled that total with 110,000. Starfield has surpassed its predecessor with reportedly over 293,000 voiced lines of dialogue. All of this dialogue requires audio files, to say nothing of the system to coordinate it all.