An SSD upgrade to 2TB or something would cost less than the game does these days. Or if they’re on an extreme budget they can probably find a basic 500GB or 1TB SSD for $10-15 used somewhere.
They’re also playing the games on their laptop for some reason, which is certainly an interesting choice for two of the biggest games of the year.
They might not actually have a choice about playing on a laptop if they normally play on a PS5. Baldur’s Gate isn’t out on PS5 yet and Starfield is Xbox/PC exclusive.
like i usually hate the whole, “buy a 2tb ssd, its only like $60” line. like to a lot of people that isn’t something you can just drop casually for a video game (especially on top of the price of the game itself!) but I don’t really think thats the perspective this writer is coming from.
Same. Those comments are coming from a place of privilege.
A lot of people in a first world country can’t afford splurges like that anymore. In third world countries it’s even worse. Because of import fees, scarcity, and price gauging, a $60 SSD can easily become $100+. In some countries that’s over half of the average monthly income
Counterpoint: If not having room for a $70 game because there’s a $60 game already on there (which also isn’t normally a problem for him because his main gaming system is his $500 gaming console) is an issue, then the article is already being written from a position of privilege.
Idk about this price I call shenanigans. I just bought an m.2 drive 2tb for $80 and that was a DEAL for me.
So here’s some perspective from a poor grad student’s life:
After getting the m.2 and an m.2 housing to do the transfer that left me broke for some time considering I only make $10/hr + (shitty commission) and bills/food are insane.
What I really need to upgrade now is my processor, but again doing something like this really is a luxury. Are all my bills paid? Have I spent a good amount on food recently? Like right now I need an oil change and some new tires so that’s yet another month AT LEAST of putting off the upgrade.
Before I was putting it off bc I had to move to go back to school and I hadn’t found a job yet in the new location.
Before that I was putting it off to save up for the process of moving and buying out of my old lease after a crazy roommate disagreement (I always have roommates bc I can’t afford to live by myself).
Before that I had to help a friend get out of an abusive relationship and support them for a while, while they got back on their feet.
Before that my other friend blew up my car’s engine and I had to blow every cent of my savings on a new car.
And while it’s true that I could’ve probably tightened my belt a few times or cut out an unnecessary luxury here or there to get the upgrades I wanted the bottom line is: priority.
The REAL bottom line is: buying games is expensive all by itself and frankly I’d rather come home crack open a beer and try to forget that I’m selling every hour of my life to my capitalist overlords than I would have a few extra fps. I’d rather cut myself some slack/some time to study by eating out for a night than be able to hold a bunch of these mega giant ass games on my drive.
I’d MUCH rather gaming companies take care of THEIR workers and give them reasonable time frames to finish games and optimize them than I would have a brand new triple A title come out glitchy as fuck just in time for whatever holiday season they think my poor ass will be able to afford it (spoiler that season is steam summer sale bc I’ll be damned if I buy 99% of games full price.)
tl;dr gaming may be one of my getaways from life but I’d rather game companies prioritize giving their workers time to optimize and complete games. I’d rather me prioritize the small day to day luxuries that get me by in life than prioritize having a baller computer to play those glitchy unfinished unoptimized new titles.
This resonates so much with me. I was hoping to upgrade my GPU this summer, and… yeah, that hasn’t happened. But new release games are almost always a mess for the price paid, and there’s an awful lot of indie games that run perfectly on my computer as it is right now. I don’t think people like us are the target demographic of AAA studios.
While thats all interesting to read, you are adding in so many additional variables, we aren’t talking about whether the game is too big or not anymore, we are talking about how you are slowly being buried in debt and at the same rate running out of things that make you happy.
¯\(ツ)/¯ who said I had debt? I’m just poor. Surprisingly debt free though. That being said I am being burned out by capitalism
annnndddd I am simultaneously being shoved into a position where I’m super isolated in my life bc of the sheer amount I have to work and study.
I think I could’ve reigned it in and talked about just wanting game devs to have time to do their games justice and how capitalism sucks ass but I was in one of my oversharing moods.
It does depend on the device though. A desktop PC can easily be upgraded with a new drive, but a laptop it may not be as easy, or in some cases, not possible at all. Could always use an external drive, but those are usually more expensive and quite inconvenient if you move the laptop around.
For less than 100 USD ($90 - I just checked) there are several well-reviewed 2230 form factor 1 TB NVME drives on Amazon - specifically, the Corsair MP600 Mini, the Teamgroup MP44S, and the Inland TN446. And though I don’t have one of those drives (I have the 2 TB version of the Sabrent Rocket instead) I speak from experience when I say that the install process is straightforward.
If you’re paying $20/TB, you’re probably getting ripped off with some counterfeit garbage from a no-name Chinese Amazon seller that’s not even close to the advertised capacity. I wouldn’t put anything on one of those drives that I have any intention of keeping for longer than a week at that price.
Firefox has a setting to disable autoplaying of videos (default setting is to autoplay muted for some reason). It’s in Settings > Site Permissions > Autoplay.
Yeah, like I picked up an 8TB SSD for like $300 the other day to move shit off of three old platter drives, I still have room to spare. A 1TB is like $60, that’s less than the cost of the game.
I’m kind of sad about how large games have become and how little goes into optimizing that since “space is cheap”; though it seems people don’t really care about the bandwidth (environmental) cost of downloading that now that everything has gone digital (not that I’m saying physical doesn’t have waste).
I just kind of wish there were alternates, maybe high-res (free) DLC packs or audio localization packs which I feel like were done in the past but never really became a thing. I find myself sticking to indie games that are only hundreds of MBs instead.
I don’t think the article provides any conclusions besides beat games faster to delete them to clear space.
Space might be cheap, but SSDs are too small for the slot they take up that could’ve had a much bigger HDD, and now graphics cards are so big there’s physically less room for disks and cables too.
I don’t want all SSDs to have room for all the games and nothing else.
how little goes into optimizing that since “space is cheap”
More and more developers seem to assume everyone else can afford what they consider to be cheap, and feel entitled to gobble up all the resources on other people’s systems as if they aren’t needed for anything else.
And speaking of environmental costs, there’s also the pollution and e-waste generated by constantly pushing people to upgrade their hardware instead of optimizing the software.
As a developer myself, I find it embarrassing and sad.
More and more developers seem to assume everyone else can afford what they consider to be cheap, and feel entitled to gobble up all the resources on other people’s systems as if they aren’t needed for anything else.
It’s adding insult to injury when most of these games are now also launching at $70-80 these days, too.
I’m fully behind the idea that you should be able to opt for not downloading the biggest texture files and 3D assets, if you’re gonna play at low settings, anyway.
But it’s worth noting that “optimizing” the file sizes of high-fidelity games isn’t really possible. You can’t compress textures or 3D assets the same way you might an RGB image. Game textures contain a lot more layers than just color, in modern games they can contain material, depth and specularity maps, just to name a few. And that’s before considering any accompanying bre-baked lighting data that entire levels may come with, which trades in the need to real-time render stuff for doing it in advance and storing how something is supposed to look, and shipping it alongside the game.
None of this can be easily compressed. It has to be retained losslessly, or you risk rendering artefacts.
Also, most game distribution services will send you an AGGRESSIVELY compressed (as in packed as a whole, using great amounts of CPU to pack it smaller without data loss) format, which your PC/console unpacks as it downloads. They too have every reason to save bandwidth.
But even then, you seldom see data savings of more than 10-30%. There just aren’t that many corners to cut.
I’m not a game dev, but from my modding experience it depends on the game.
MOST of the games that have these insane file sizes actually do it to cut down on processing and on load time and reduce pop-in. If a texture or level doesn’t need any decompression, it loads faster. So entirely depends on the asset. So a lot of games do still compress textures. That’s why there’s a discrepancy between the data downloaded in steam and the actual runtime storage requirement.
The 3D models themselves are usually lower space. As is dialog and audio. Though all of those will be mildly compressed probably.
Texture block compression exists, and some of the available algorithms have fairly little impact on rendered visuals.
As you noted, asset scaling also exists in various forms, from mip mapping to audio codecs to alternate asset packs. Imagery intended for 4k and 8k displays is wasteful for people gaming in 1080p, let alone 720p.
The techniques required to cut down on bloat are well known. Some games just aren’t using them, or aren’t using them effectively. There’s definitely room for improvement here.
But I did want to make the point that there aren’t as many corners to cut as some might think.
And while lossless compression of course exists, better compression is usually also a processing trade-off. You can use more storage and less processing, or use more processing, and less storage.
Compression is not a magic tool that reduces file size for free, its doing math to store some given data using less bits, which then has to be done in reverse to get at the original data.
I’d love to play through the Mass Effect remastered collection on my steam deck but it’s ridiculous that it makes you download all 3 games (100+ GB). On the other hand, Halo MCC is actually good about this and lets you download only the games you want to play at the moment
Even through toy have to download them, doesn’t mean you have to keep them. After download ING you can go to the install action path and the delete the other two games you don’t want.
I remember when GTA 5 hit PC in 2015 and was around 90 gigs. Seems like we’ve finally hit the point where most AAA games are around its size. How time flies…
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No space? Lol, clearly you’ve never played ARK Survival Evolved
isnt that only 400 something GB?
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Games really need a solution similar to Android.
Have a lower res screen? Only need to download 1080p assets and textures.
Have a 4k screen? Good luck to your SSD.
An SSD upgrade to 2TB or something would cost less than the game does these days. Or if they’re on an extreme budget they can probably find a basic 500GB or 1TB SSD for $10-15 used somewhere.
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They might not actually have a choice about playing on a laptop if they normally play on a PS5. Baldur’s Gate isn’t out on PS5 yet and Starfield is Xbox/PC exclusive.
Look at this guy trying to play 2 games.
Shit, I know someone who had to purchase an extra SSD just to dedicate it to Call of Duty.
Get an external SSD if you can’t open the laptop, Modern laptops will have a fast usb c port available (I use mine for VR).
They also talk about playing ToTK on the laptop too…
“Will Tears of the Kingdom take up the space they otherwise would have occupied?”
I know you can emulate but this writer wtf
like i usually hate the whole, “buy a 2tb ssd, its only like $60” line. like to a lot of people that isn’t something you can just drop casually for a video game (especially on top of the price of the game itself!) but I don’t really think thats the perspective this writer is coming from.
Same. Those comments are coming from a place of privilege.
A lot of people in a first world country can’t afford splurges like that anymore. In third world countries it’s even worse. Because of import fees, scarcity, and price gauging, a $60 SSD can easily become $100+. In some countries that’s over half of the average monthly income
Counterpoint: If not having room for a $70 game because there’s a $60 game already on there (which also isn’t normally a problem for him because his main gaming system is his $500 gaming console) is an issue, then the article is already being written from a position of privilege.
Yup. And with regional pricing, the discrepancy between a game’s price and hardware price is even greater.
For example, BG3 is around 15 dollars in Argentina, but a 2TB SSD is around 130 dollars.
That’s a silly excuse. At roughly $20 / TB, a 150gb game shouldn’t be an issue
Idk about this price I call shenanigans. I just bought an m.2 drive 2tb for $80 and that was a DEAL for me.
So here’s some perspective from a poor grad student’s life:
After getting the m.2 and an m.2 housing to do the transfer that left me broke for some time considering I only make $10/hr + (shitty commission) and bills/food are insane.
What I really need to upgrade now is my processor, but again doing something like this really is a luxury. Are all my bills paid? Have I spent a good amount on food recently? Like right now I need an oil change and some new tires so that’s yet another month AT LEAST of putting off the upgrade.
Before I was putting it off bc I had to move to go back to school and I hadn’t found a job yet in the new location.
Before that I was putting it off to save up for the process of moving and buying out of my old lease after a crazy roommate disagreement (I always have roommates bc I can’t afford to live by myself).
Before that I had to help a friend get out of an abusive relationship and support them for a while, while they got back on their feet.
Before that my other friend blew up my car’s engine and I had to blow every cent of my savings on a new car.
And while it’s true that I could’ve probably tightened my belt a few times or cut out an unnecessary luxury here or there to get the upgrades I wanted the bottom line is: priority.
The REAL bottom line is: buying games is expensive all by itself and frankly I’d rather come home crack open a beer and try to forget that I’m selling every hour of my life to my capitalist overlords than I would have a few extra fps. I’d rather cut myself some slack/some time to study by eating out for a night than be able to hold a bunch of these mega giant ass games on my drive.
I’d MUCH rather gaming companies take care of THEIR workers and give them reasonable time frames to finish games and optimize them than I would have a brand new triple A title come out glitchy as fuck just in time for whatever holiday season they think my poor ass will be able to afford it (spoiler that season is steam summer sale bc I’ll be damned if I buy 99% of games full price.)
tl;dr gaming may be one of my getaways from life but I’d rather game companies prioritize giving their workers time to optimize and complete games. I’d rather me prioritize the small day to day luxuries that get me by in life than prioritize having a baller computer to play those glitchy unfinished unoptimized new titles.
This resonates so much with me. I was hoping to upgrade my GPU this summer, and… yeah, that hasn’t happened. But new release games are almost always a mess for the price paid, and there’s an awful lot of indie games that run perfectly on my computer as it is right now. I don’t think people like us are the target demographic of AAA studios.
While thats all interesting to read, you are adding in so many additional variables, we aren’t talking about whether the game is too big or not anymore, we are talking about how you are slowly being buried in debt and at the same rate running out of things that make you happy.
¯\(ツ)/¯ who said I had debt? I’m just poor. Surprisingly debt free though. That being said I am being burned out by capitalism
annnndddd I am simultaneously being shoved into a position where I’m super isolated in my life bc of the sheer amount I have to work and study.
I think I could’ve reigned it in and talked about just wanting game devs to have time to do their games justice and how capitalism sucks ass but I was in one of my oversharing moods.
Where do you get your hard drives? Cheapest 1tb SSD I can get is $65, and the cheapest 1tb nvme drive is $80.
Not in Australia, I can assure. Unless they are buying them second hand on Facebook marketplace
I can get a 2tb m.2 for $70, then put that in one of my ssd converters. Voila $70 2tb ssd.
When was the last time you shopped for an SSD? Cheapest 1TB NVMe are around $35.
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It does depend on the device though. A desktop PC can easily be upgraded with a new drive, but a laptop it may not be as easy, or in some cases, not possible at all. Could always use an external drive, but those are usually more expensive and quite inconvenient if you move the laptop around.
If somebody can point me in the direction of a $20 1TB NVME for my Steam Deck and a free transfer tool please hmu
For a Steam Deck, you’re looking at $100 for a good SD card, but that’s the price you pay for miniaturization.
For less than 100 USD ($90 - I just checked) there are several well-reviewed 2230 form factor 1 TB NVME drives on Amazon - specifically, the Corsair MP600 Mini, the Teamgroup MP44S, and the Inland TN446. And though I don’t have one of those drives (I have the 2 TB version of the Sabrent Rocket instead) I speak from experience when I say that the install process is straightforward.
Yes, but in this instance laptops that can actually run AAA games are 15" or larger and don’t have everything soldered like ultrabooks etc
If you’re paying $20/TB, you’re probably getting ripped off with some counterfeit garbage from a no-name Chinese Amazon seller that’s not even close to the advertised capacity. I wouldn’t put anything on one of those drives that I have any intention of keeping for longer than a week at that price.
They might be talking about Hard Drive, which often goes on sale at 200$ for 10TB or 160$ for 8TB (and so on). SSDs are obviously more expensive.
You still have until the 6th, better get off Lemmy and play ;D
Whom ever wrote this article is a massive idiot.
Seems like the common vibe in “gaming” articles lately. Low hanging fruit Clickbait slathered in ads and autoplaying videos.
Firefox has a setting to disable autoplaying of videos (default setting is to autoplay muted for some reason). It’s in Settings > Site Permissions > Autoplay.
My man is trying to install both games on a PlayStation One memory card
Yeah, like I picked up an 8TB SSD for like $300 the other day to move shit off of three old platter drives, I still have room to spare. A 1TB is like $60, that’s less than the cost of the game.
I just my kid a 2TB ssd for $60. 1TB can be found under $30 lately.
A 1tb gen 3 nvme is only $35-40 💀
Maybe overseas, but round here 1tb ssds start at around $60-70 and you’ll be lucky to get a 2tb one for less than $150…
I’m kind of sad about how large games have become and how little goes into optimizing that since “space is cheap”; though it seems people don’t really care about the bandwidth (environmental) cost of downloading that now that everything has gone digital (not that I’m saying physical doesn’t have waste).
I just kind of wish there were alternates, maybe high-res (free) DLC packs or audio localization packs which I feel like were done in the past but never really became a thing. I find myself sticking to indie games that are only hundreds of MBs instead.
I don’t think the article provides any conclusions besides beat games faster to delete them to clear space.
Space might be cheap, but SSDs are too small for the slot they take up that could’ve had a much bigger HDD, and now graphics cards are so big there’s physically less room for disks and cables too.
I don’t want all SSDs to have room for all the games and nothing else.
My cousin just bought a 2tb nvme for $60, $10 more than a 2tb hdd cost 2 years ago.
But I want 8 TB drives. Or more, when they’re more reliable.
More and more developers seem to assume everyone else can afford what they consider to be cheap, and feel entitled to gobble up all the resources on other people’s systems as if they aren’t needed for anything else.
And speaking of environmental costs, there’s also the pollution and e-waste generated by constantly pushing people to upgrade their hardware instead of optimizing the software.
As a developer myself, I find it embarrassing and sad.
It’s adding insult to injury when most of these games are now also launching at $70-80 these days, too.
I’m fully behind the idea that you should be able to opt for not downloading the biggest texture files and 3D assets, if you’re gonna play at low settings, anyway.
But it’s worth noting that “optimizing” the file sizes of high-fidelity games isn’t really possible. You can’t compress textures or 3D assets the same way you might an RGB image. Game textures contain a lot more layers than just color, in modern games they can contain material, depth and specularity maps, just to name a few. And that’s before considering any accompanying bre-baked lighting data that entire levels may come with, which trades in the need to real-time render stuff for doing it in advance and storing how something is supposed to look, and shipping it alongside the game.
None of this can be easily compressed. It has to be retained losslessly, or you risk rendering artefacts.
Also, most game distribution services will send you an AGGRESSIVELY compressed (as in packed as a whole, using great amounts of CPU to pack it smaller without data loss) format, which your PC/console unpacks as it downloads. They too have every reason to save bandwidth.
But even then, you seldom see data savings of more than 10-30%. There just aren’t that many corners to cut.
I’m not a game dev, but from my modding experience it depends on the game.
MOST of the games that have these insane file sizes actually do it to cut down on processing and on load time and reduce pop-in. If a texture or level doesn’t need any decompression, it loads faster. So entirely depends on the asset. So a lot of games do still compress textures. That’s why there’s a discrepancy between the data downloaded in steam and the actual runtime storage requirement.
The 3D models themselves are usually lower space. As is dialog and audio. Though all of those will be mildly compressed probably.
Texture block compression exists, and some of the available algorithms have fairly little impact on rendered visuals.
As you noted, asset scaling also exists in various forms, from mip mapping to audio codecs to alternate asset packs. Imagery intended for 4k and 8k displays is wasteful for people gaming in 1080p, let alone 720p.
The techniques required to cut down on bloat are well known. Some games just aren’t using them, or aren’t using them effectively. There’s definitely room for improvement here.
Absolutely.
But I did want to make the point that there aren’t as many corners to cut as some might think.
And while lossless compression of course exists, better compression is usually also a processing trade-off. You can use more storage and less processing, or use more processing, and less storage.
Compression is not a magic tool that reduces file size for free, its doing math to store some given data using less bits, which then has to be done in reverse to get at the original data.
Even old games like CSGO are large in size now… 4K as a free DLC is a good idea!
I’d love to play through the Mass Effect remastered collection on my steam deck but it’s ridiculous that it makes you download all 3 games (100+ GB). On the other hand, Halo MCC is actually good about this and lets you download only the games you want to play at the moment
Even through toy have to download them, doesn’t mean you have to keep them. After download ING you can go to the install action path and the delete the other two games you don’t want.
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Content behind an anti-blocker wall. How much space does this game take?
My preload is currently sitting at 117GB according to Windows’s move programs list
PC is about 130 GB I believe.
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I remember when GTA 5 hit PC in 2015 and was around 90 gigs. Seems like we’ve finally hit the point where most AAA games are around its size. How time flies…
Yeah I remember that too. Doom 2016 was like 70 gbs and there were gaming news articles about it. Now 70 is on the low end for AAA.
I recall it boggling my mind that GTAIV was 15GB (two dual layer DVDs basically) now I have copies of movies that large kicking around on my NAS.
Idc about the size of games because I just download them when I need. 1gigabit down gang.