In 1988, NEC of Japan released the CD-ROM² System, an add-on for their PC Engine console. While most games at the time were based on the cartridge format, the CD offered new frontiers of storage. You could fit hundreds of megabytes on a CD! For reference, at the time, in North America, you could fit the entire library of the most popular game console, the NES, on one CD. How would we ever fill this storage format?
Flash forward to today, where a Playstation 4 has taken up residence underneath my own television. It came equipped with a 500 GB hard drive, which is enough to store every game ever released for that CD-ROM² System, and then some.
It is full already, and I have only owned that system since December. I don’t even own that many games for it, the games themselves have just become a bit overweight. Uncharted 4, for example, tips the scales at over 60 GB once you include all of the patches, Final Fantasy XV does the same. The size of one game is the same as the size of an entire, healthy-sized hard drive made in the early 2000s.
The issue is that there really isn’t any incentive for people to keep the size of their products down. Back in the day, it was expensive to make a game bigger. You would have to order a larger, more expensive cartridge, you would have to spread it over more CDs or DVDs.
Now, we’re in the age of digital distribution, and games have bloated. Evidently the costs associated with pushing a game out over download are not significant, because it’s not uncommon to sail merrily over the 50 GB barrier.
For the consumer, it’s a pain to have to shuffle games around every time you want to try a new one, as giant file sizes make it easy to completely fill a drive. It’s possible to give up and just buy accessories to get around the problem, a new hard drive whether external or internal, but it’s still the case that we have companies that have run wild, unfettered by size limits, taking up entire hard drives with their products.
But consumers have brought this upon themselves. The endless push for better graphics has meant that the graphics themselves get larger – textures, for example, are much bigger and more detailed than ever before. Voice acting takes up space too, as does music.
However, it can feel as though this search for graphical fidelity and the massive size of games that goes with it might be misguided. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild isn’t a small game – 13 GB to download if you get the version for Nintendo Switch – but it’s also well under 50 GB, has a staggering amount of content, plus it looks and sounds great. It might even prove that you don’t need your game to be absolutely huge if you make it right. Learn some lessons from that, and maybe our hard drives won’t collapse under the weight of the content on them.
