It’s been over six years since I shared with you an article explaining why games were taking up more and more space. Said article has aged quite well, although we must add another important detail, and that is the use of duplicate assets to reduce the impact that hard drives have on access and load times, a burden that we are still dragging today.
What we generically know as assets are nothing more than the game files and data that are installed on the storage unit, and that are necessary for its operation. One HDD storage unit may have to access data and files that are located in different places on the same platteror they can even end up separated on different decks, which in the end makes the search times extremely long, and the loading times very heavy.
Duplicating these assets in various areas of the disk helps these types of units speed up the search and access process, but obviously this means that in the end we have to occupy more space with data and files that are actually unnecessary. SSD drives don’t have this problem, but as we know they coexist with hard drives, and in the end the previous generation consoles still have a huge user base, which is why they continue to be the basis of many game developments.
The fact is that in 2017 we began to be surprised when we saw that some games already exceeded the 70 GB barrier, and the evolution we have experienced has been clear. We can say that the consumption of between 90 and 130 GB of space in games has been normalized, and some, like Call of Duty Modern Warfare, reached the 200 GB barrier, a real madness that made more than one fan of the franchise have to update their equipment and add a new storage unit.
If we look at the latest triple A releases we will realize that there is a very clear trend to exceed 100 GB. For example, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor requires 155 GB of free space on PC, while Forspoken consumes 150 GB, and both RedFall and The Last of Us Part I require 100 GB of free space. Diablo IV is not far behind, since to move the new Blizzard we will need 90 GB of free space, and another of the most anticipated games, Baldur’s Gate 3, could consume up to 150 GB of space.
When facing this trend, it is clear that if we have a very small storage unit, we will have no choice but to buy a larger capacity. Luckily prices have dropped a lot, and we can buy 1 TB SSD storage units from only 50.99 euros.
However, we can also resort to cloud gaming, since this will allow us to play new generation titles without having to install them on our PC, and there are totally free modalities that work quite well. Deleting games to free up space and not have titles installed that we are no longer going to play is another solution, but we must be careful with the read and write cyclessince these in the end can significantly reduce the useful life of an SSD unit if they are very high and occur in very short periods of time.
