Even if you ignore the time it takes to download for those with low speed connections or data caps, the issue is made worse by a lack of competitively priced storage options for the Xbox Series consoles. PC owners by comparison have it much easier.
I’m looking forward to Starfield, but there’s no way in hell I’m playing it on day one. I got burned back when Skyrim came out and I lost eight hours of progress due to a bug.
As I usually say, playing day one is playing to the WORST version of the game 😅. I will still play it day one if I can complete my current games, but we have to keep this in mind when playing day one.
Even a banger like BG3, if you aren’t dying to play it, benefits from waiting for Patch 1, so it’s generally decent advice/practice to let a game get over the first couple hurdles.
Somehow I ended up with a pre-order by buying a laptop. It feels like they’ve been practically giving them out, at least with their AMD partnership, and assuming you’re already in the market looking at hardware. I wasn’t even planning to buy the game originally, maybe I’ll play it.
With game size becoming very huge, I sometimes hope that digital storefronts or devs would give us an option to download the game / assets depending on the configuration that we want to play under.
I still don’t own a 4K monitor and have a relatively slow download speed, it’d be great if customers could choose a 1080p option to save time and space.
I remember vaguely about smart download system, announced during Xbox’s stage show, a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember whether it’s for deciding between Xbox Series S and X, or it’s for something else.
Diablo 4 allows that. Let’s you choose to get the 4K Textures or not and which languages for Voiceover / Cutscenes. The textures alone decide if you game is 40 or 80 GB.
There are some games that split high-res assets into separate free DLC. I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve definitely seen it on Steam. For example, Shadow of War does this with high-res textures and 4k cinematics.
JFC. I just set up a NAS with 32 TB Storage : 17 TB usable in Raid 5. Here I am thinking I have god level storage capacity and then keep getting reminded alot of new games keep getting released with 100+ GB storage requirements.
At these sizes I’m starting to think that game devs should just go back to physical storage.
If I’m going to have to store 100 + GB, then the storage space is now a meaningful contributor to the cost of the game. It looks like quad-layer Bluray disks can store 128 GB. I’m not sure what the cost to produce them is, but I’d be curious if it’s worse than the cost players have to pay in buying more storage space for these giant games.
At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.
And m.2 drives at gen four are at like 7000MB/s for reads. And those drives have gotten significantly cheaper over the last half year or so. Gen 5 hits speeds of like 12000MB/s
I got a 2tb gen 4 for 100 recently so my computer now has 3tb of m.2 drives for total of 170 euros spent.
PCIe gen 5 speeds are double PCIe gen 4 speeds, for the same number of lanes of course. Whether a hard drive is capable of those speeds is another story (although my current drive pushes the limits of gen 4). I’m not sure what the fastest PCIe gen 5 hard drive on the market is right now, but eventually we will start to approach the limits of gen 5 and start looking at gen 6 drives, at least at this rate.
Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.
For PC: the vast majority of PCs don’t have a blu ray drive. So that’s a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.
Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It’s a huge difference.
As far as I know, the Xbox One and PS4 started the trend of reading nothing from the disc after install. The disc just acts as instalation media and a physical authenticator.
I agree that game sizes are pretty ridiculous these days. This and Baldurs Gate 3 will take up the entirety of my only space ssd. Sadly prices where I live are still decently high.
I’m sure things could be done to optimize the size. With the BTRFS filesystem, you can have things autocompress in a transparent way. So, I installed like 600gb of games, but it only took up 450gb of space because of filesystem compression. Additionally, files load like they are just a normal file.
I wonder how much space would be saved by installing this game to that filesystem.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !gaming@beehaw.org
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it’s gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
Even if you ignore the time it takes to download for those with low speed connections or data caps, the issue is made worse by a lack of competitively priced storage options for the Xbox Series consoles. PC owners by comparison have it much easier.
That’s why you’re an absolute fool if you buy an Xbox.
I’m looking forward to Starfield, but there’s no way in hell I’m playing it on day one. I got burned back when Skyrim came out and I lost eight hours of progress due to a bug.
Maybe wait a few months at least. Let the modders put the other cheek in, if you catch my drift.
Straight up, I’m planning to wait for reviews and some patches to roll out.
I’ve been playing Bethesda games for awhile and every single 3D game made by them has had some serious issues on launch.
As I usually say, playing day one is playing to the WORST version of the game 😅. I will still play it day one if I can complete my current games, but we have to keep this in mind when playing day one.
Maybe skip it for a few months. Let the modders put the other cheek in, if you catch my drift.
Even a banger like BG3, if you aren’t dying to play it, benefits from waiting for Patch 1, so it’s generally decent advice/practice to let a game get over the first couple hurdles.
But if you don’t pre-order, they might run out of digital copies! /s
Somehow I ended up with a pre-order by buying a laptop. It feels like they’ve been practically giving them out, at least with their AMD partnership, and assuming you’re already in the market looking at hardware. I wasn’t even planning to buy the game originally, maybe I’ll play it.
With game size becoming very huge, I sometimes hope that digital storefronts or devs would give us an option to download the game / assets depending on the configuration that we want to play under.
I still don’t own a 4K monitor and have a relatively slow download speed, it’d be great if customers could choose a 1080p option to save time and space.
I remember vaguely about smart download system, announced during Xbox’s stage show, a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember whether it’s for deciding between Xbox Series S and X, or it’s for something else.
Diablo 4 allows that. Let’s you choose to get the 4K Textures or not and which languages for Voiceover / Cutscenes. The textures alone decide if you game is 40 or 80 GB.
Yes it does. The download size for xss will be smaller than xsx.
There are some games that split high-res assets into separate free DLC. I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve definitely seen it on Steam. For example, Shadow of War does this with high-res textures and 4k cinematics.
Iirc, its also the case for skyrim on steam (though not sure which edition). So its not something new fot Bethesda.
JFC. I just set up a NAS with 32 TB Storage : 17 TB usable in Raid 5. Here I am thinking I have god level storage capacity and then keep getting reminded alot of new games keep getting released with 100+ GB storage requirements.
Thanks, fuck the clickbait
Doing the lord’s work
At these sizes I’m starting to think that game devs should just go back to physical storage.
If I’m going to have to store 100 + GB, then the storage space is now a meaningful contributor to the cost of the game. It looks like quad-layer Bluray disks can store 128 GB. I’m not sure what the cost to produce them is, but I’d be curious if it’s worse than the cost players have to pay in buying more storage space for these giant games.
At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.
And m.2 drives at gen four are at like 7000MB/s for reads. And those drives have gotten significantly cheaper over the last half year or so. Gen 5 hits speeds of like 12000MB/s
I got a 2tb gen 4 for 100 recently so my computer now has 3tb of m.2 drives for total of 170 euros spent.
PCIe gen 5 speeds are double PCIe gen 4 speeds, for the same number of lanes of course. Whether a hard drive is capable of those speeds is another story (although my current drive pushes the limits of gen 4). I’m not sure what the fastest PCIe gen 5 hard drive on the market is right now, but eventually we will start to approach the limits of gen 5 and start looking at gen 6 drives, at least at this rate.
Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.
For PC: the vast majority of PCs don’t have a blu ray drive. So that’s a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.
Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It’s a huge difference.
As far as I know, the Xbox One and PS4 started the trend of reading nothing from the disc after install. The disc just acts as instalation media and a physical authenticator.
140GB for PC. Wow. That’s pretty insane. Guess I’ll be saving this for the end of the month.
I agree that game sizes are pretty ridiculous these days. This and Baldurs Gate 3 will take up the entirety of my only space ssd. Sadly prices where I live are still decently high.
I’m sure things could be done to optimize the size. With the BTRFS filesystem, you can have things autocompress in a transparent way. So, I installed like 600gb of games, but it only took up 450gb of space because of filesystem compression. Additionally, files load like they are just a normal file.
I wonder how much space would be saved by installing this game to that filesystem.
Preload starts on August 30th on PC. Quite a difference to “now”
That date’s for Steam.