Why Are Game Installation Sizes Still Increasing?


In 1989, the first Sierra game I ever played, Space Quest III, shipped on six 5.25-inch double-density, double-sided floppy disks. A hard drive was optional, though copying the game files to the HDD substantially improved performance. The total game install was between 3.5 and 4MB–but that was significant, when a computer from the same time period only had between 10 or 20MB of HDD space.

Fast forward nearly 30 years, and games of today commonly eat dozens of gigabytes per install, dwarfing the sizes that were common as recently as five years ago, at the end of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. To some extent, this is to be expected. As consoles and PCs have become more powerful, they’ve added support for higher resolutions and more detailed graphics. These higher-quality detail levels require higher-quality assets, which means the game installation grows as a result. Increasing the size of a game world or adding additional content also increases total installation size. If a (sadly hypothetical) Skyrim II uses art assets that are four times larger on average than Skyrim’s, and is twice the geographical size, the final game is going to be far larger than its predecessor.

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