by On the list of life’s many stressors—money, health, social injustice, wanting to buy eggs at the grocery store but not sure if there are any left in the fridge—free space on my SSD ranks surprisingly high. The new mass install of the game hits like a stab in the stomach. Each week is another dozen gigabytes closer to the need to make deep cuts. I am Really Will you go back to playing Ready or Not with my friend? That’s 92GB, which could be coming to Diablo 4 next month.
It’s amazing how often the size of a download affects whether or not I’ll play a game at all. I’ve been meaning to try Atomic Heart on Game Pass since February. Three times I started a 90GB download and three times I canceled it and did something else instead. I don’t remember ever doing that 10 years ago. Even though my internet connection was probably half as fast back then, the average high profile game was 5-10 times smaller.
So of course we want to keep the game installed for as long as possible. Removing the huge game is equivalent to throwing the box into a bigger box, sealing it with tape eight different ways, and sealing it up in the attic – sure, if you want to play it again, it’s there, but will you? Rising file sizes, the proliferation of ever-expanding free games, and stagnant download speeds make this annoyance more noticeable. And if the first half of 2023 was any indication, the number of downloads is not diminishing any time soon.
2023 is already straining our SSDs
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – 130GB
- Forgotten – 120GB
- redfall – 100GB
- The Last of Us Part 1 – 100GB
- atomic heart – 90GB
- Diablo 4 – 90GB
- wild hearts – 80GB
- Hogwarts Legacy – 73 GB
- RE4 Remake – 56GB
- Dead Island 2 – 45 GB
More than half of Steam users have 1 TB of storage or less.
wowza. It’s safe to say we’re firmly in the 100GB gaming era, right? It used to be that a game hit triple digits made headlines, but in 2023, six of the top ten PC games of the year hit 90-130 GB. It’s probably no coincidence that of these six, all but one are huge sandbox games. With these numbers, the days of just playing the game “on a whim” are basically over. According to Steam, the average American downloads games at around 12MB per second. That’s over 3 hours of download time for the current 2023 size champion Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (opens in a new tab)a definite “whim” killer, and people at the lower end of that average fare much worse.
Not to mention people with data constraints. My Windows data usage report says I’ve used 255GB this month on Steam alone. If you stream hours of TV and movies every week, or worse, watch your friends stream their games on Discord (opens in a new tab)the number of gigs can add up really quickly.
Games are big, but we’re used to managing storage
I’m one of the lucky ones. My SSD is luxuriously spacious at 2TB, of which Star Wars takes up a paltry 6%. Latest Steam Hardware Survey (opens in a new tab) reveals that just over half of Steam users have 1TB of storage or less.
In context: if you’re an average PC gamer who perhaps picked up Jedi: Survivor on launch day, gave Redfall a shot at Game Pass next week, and want to play the Diablo 4 Server Slam beta this weekend, that’s a third of the whole PC (or more if you count all the gigabytes your boot disk won’t let you use).
The numbers are against us, but we’re also pretty good at managing our gigantic gaming future. The same Steam survey also found that around 30% of users had between 250 and 750 GB of free space on their PC at the time. It also helps that Steam has made it easier to mass delete stuff with the addition of a memory manager in 2021 (opens in a new tab).
Good News: Multiplayer Games Not Growing (Right Now)
Okay, Jedi: Survivor. Use 130GB of my computer and see if I care – eventually you’ll be deleted. The increasing size of the games I’ve completed is far less of a concern than the trail of multiplayer games I almost never delete.
The days of just playing the game “on a whim” are basically over.
For a while, the size of multiplayer games seemed to be getting out of hand as well. I raised the alarm (opens in a new tab) in 2020, when Call of Duty, which recently became Warzone, has grown into a 200GB unholy beast. But Activision worked: That same year, they introduced the option to uninstall individual Call of Duty bits that you no longer play.
There are still some popular shooters that are uncomfortably large, like Destiny 2, CoD, and Rainbow Six, but it’s encouraging that in the past they’ve all been bigger and shrunk:
- Destiny 2 – 105 GB
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 + Warzone 2 – 98 GB
- Final Fantasy 14 – 80GB
- Rainbow Six Siege – 80GB
- Battlefield 2042 – 75GB
- Apex Legends – 60 GB
- Dota 2 – 46GB
- The Hunt: Duel – 45 GB
- Hello Infinity – 45 GB
- PUBG- 32.5GB
- Brave – 32GB
- Fortnite – 32GB
- CS GO – 30GB
- League of Legends – 22GB
I can live with these numbers. Add the last four games from this list if you haven’t downloaded even one Forspoken. It’s nice to see developers taking game size seriously, probably because they’ve noticed the effect an annoyingly large download can have on attracting new players.
Keep an eye out for potential data leaks until the end of 2023. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is likely to be big, though it’s said to target a smaller world than Valhalla and Odyssey. Stalker 2 might be an unexpected triple digiter with all those nice-looking trailers, though we may have to wait longer for that. I’m curious how big Starfield will be. Bethesda Game Studios hasn’t released anything since 2015’s Fallout 4, which is currently a relatively small 27GB download (without extensions), so maybe this will surprise us.
I’m keeping a close eye on Baldur’s Gate 3 – the current Early Access version is already eating up 103GB, but the official system requirements suggest the final game will be 150GB. Yes.
