I use a USB thumbdrive to transfer my purchases to the machine I use to play them, so I, for one, would be inconvenienced in the manner you outline.

I also blew my entire month's download cap when I purchased Fallout 4 last month, so I am certainly not interested in 100+MB bloatware. :o

Have you noticed the profligate use of space now that everyone is streaming everything? I have actually monitored the size of downloads (the filesize footprint) versus the amount of data transmitted down the wire (and I have all my connections wired by design) and the latter size is always larger and sometimes significantly so. Since a lot of (most?) people have unlimited data capacities limited only by the speed this seems to be of little import. It drives me to distraction, however. :/

Yes, all pretense of restraint goes out the window. Why have a 30 minute short movie at 500Mb, when you can have 3000 minutes spanning 3 terabytes?

The prelude of the order 1886 and pushing 60Gb games for very little other than very nice graphics for 4 hours of content. Now games are frequently pushing hundreds of gigabytes, nevermind clever ways of encoding textures and data in a way that is stored very tiny and fits within limitations of discs or something. No just leave it all uncompressed and call it good it seems.

I see some videos where 1080 is the common size and takes 2 gigs, and one user complained why everyone wasn't just downloading the 4k version. Nevermind it was 5x larger and most of us don't have 4/8k displays yet, nor do we care. And recoding videos i've gotten videos down significantly with little visual loss, leaning towards becoming a mini-encoder at this rate.

Perhaps the size is a long term ploy to stop 'illegal downloads'. "If we make the games big enough, no one will download them... Then we can sell our streaming service". Maybe...

Yeah...because most developers are super concerned about a fictional streaming service they don't have.

If you are selling and supporting a product you are often going to choose what will have the biggest audience, least support issues, and most reusable assets. So for example you have no incentive to encode video with AV1 or even HEVC when it's going to have more limited decoding support from your PC user base & maybe zero support on consoles.

I was being half sarcastic. In the last few years games ballooned from 10GB being the upper limit, to now it pushing over 100GB. With them now pushing 4k and 8k resolution games, it wouldn't be hard to see 250GB and 1TB games.

Add on top of download speeds. I did math earlier and at best i can get 50GB/day, so in theory after i buy a game i can't touch it for multiple days while monopolizing my internet; This is assuming there isn't issues. Yes there's people with far faster internet, but it's getting discouraging, unless hardware and internet speeds keep up for the same price or cheaper.

There's also an innate push for not making your own hardware, having SOCs (Systems on a chip) and a push for streaming; although the streaming part hasn't worked out that well it might work if the speed was 20x it's current speed (or live with lower resolution); SOC's may also push it, simply because people may be phasing out of doing their own desktop hardware and simply not involved with it. I'm talking about people who grew up with smart phones, small sleek black boxes with no understanding how it's put together. And now small formfactor systems on par with the size of Raspberry Pi's, a few chips to handle things like decoding video and little else; or using consoles, also a black box and DRM ridden. One video showed how a router was swapped with a linux OS and it was quite a powerful system for what it was, hardware underutilized.

It is uncertain where things will go in the next 20 years. But having bloated sized games, downloading eventually becomes unfeasible. Though it's possible they push physical discs again.

Sure, someday. That's how things progress. Where have you been? Drive sizes and network speeds continue to increase. It's not like games today are proportionally larger than they used to be. Relative to the 245MB hard drive and 2400 modem I had in the 90s or 5.25 floppy with no network in the 80s I can install way more games today then I could then.

A 100 GB game is what to a 16TB drive? .6% You'll have 50TB drives soon.

Yeah I wrote that really poorly, I meant downloads like one big file. Good correction.

There's some assumptions flying around here about how HDDs are going to increase in space and decrease in cost forever. It's not how it's panned out over the last few years and the long term trends suggest that it won't get much better than this - and 16TB HDDs are expensive even now.

Between 1998 and 2010 the dollar cost per terabyte for HDDs went from $24,800 to $45 (0.18%)

Between 2010 and 2022 the dollar cost per terabyte for HDDs went from $45 to $14.30 (31.8%)

Maybe I'm missing something here (despite price rises for HDDs over the past year or so it seems to me) but HDDs are not going to get much cheaper than todays prices and if SSDs become more popular then the prices might rise down the line. Floppy disks are much more expensive now than they were in the 90s.

Sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1998..2010&facet=metric&uniformYAxis=0

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=2010..2022&facet=metric&uniformYAxis=0

We're going thru de-globalization. Supply chains are not going to be what they were. That's going to make things more costly than in the past. That has nothing to do with the tech though. Sizes will continue to grow. And eventually, costs will drop as well.

Seagate was shipping 20TB drives in 2021 and said they were on track for 50TB hard disk drives by 2026, 100TB HDDs by 2030, and 120TB+ early next decade. So their roadmap does not seem to forecast any real slowdown.

Not that it matters. Game sizes are tiny relative to what we already have available.

With a modem and downloading a 1.44Mb image equiv, would take you... 20 minutes? Compared to 100GB which may take me 2 days (or if i was on a computer 8 hours a day, that's a week of downloading).

Certainly speeds are increasing, and drive space is increasing. But at some point there's a density issue to deal with. If i hadn't gotten a NAS to handle backups and do larger storage, i'd still be on a 1TB/2TB drive. Hell that's what the computer i'm using uses. The average person i'd say doesn't want to spend so much on storage. It's like comparing a 8 Horsepower vehicle and a 500 horsepower vehicle, after a certain amount the horsepower doesn't mean anything, and it isn't something they want to pay for. And i'll bet most people, get a machine just powerful and big enough to deal with their needs. Same for internet speed, i take the minimum internet speed because long term it's more than i need, and i am not going to pay hundreds of dollars a month just so i can download 6Mb/s for some content for an hour, and then not use it for 23 hours.

So just saying a game is 100Gb vs 16TB doesn't mean much. A lot of laptops and computers likely are still with 1TB so that's a lot more space. 100GB may be 10%, but extracting could take another 50%, so you need 250Gb to download and install said game. And if people don't have backup plans, they either get full drives, or delete stuff they don't think they need anymore.

As for 50TB drives? Doubt it. Maybe i'm misinformed on the video i watched, but hitting 20TB seems to be hitting the limit of how much data they can pack on the discs for the form factor. Maybe they can add more plates, but it isn't going to jump nearly as much. Though maybe they will go much larger drives, like i remember the BigFoot which took the space of a large bay vs the standard drive size today.

Tape drives on the other hand have the promise to greatly increase more over time.

Indeed. Newegg had a sale a month or so ago which had cheap 20TB drives, and i snatched a few up to set up a secondary backup solution.

But otherwise, yeah very expensive. 90% of users aren't going to be buying 20TB drives safe to say.

Maybe. Apparently some companies leaving china a few years ago due to issues with the CCP actually found they saved 5% in finalized costs, probably due to improved technology and not having to ship things to and from china.

Though since they are pushing things to Taiwan and India... not sure.

Referring to the video i put above, unless the physical size of drives changes, i don't see them pushing past 30TB. Though that doesn't mean they can't start doing racks or preconfigured DAS which would have the same effect, possibly with space saving by removing the control boards and the DAS being the control board, though that removes the replaceable drives part... Though if they keep dropping prices of drives at the 20TB size to something like $50, then you know RAID-6 will become a lot more common for those using storage.

Though i'd like to see tape drives that DON'T cost $6k, and then do a bit of both.

Or maybe a new optical media will come out to replace Blueray; even if it requires a shielded case if said discs could do 250GB or 1TB they would be worth a decent price and be an alternative storage media.

1st off, no one was downloading 1.44MB AAA games at the time. So that's an absurd comparison.

2nd if it takes you multiple days to download 100GB you have a TERRIBLE ISP. I hope you don't pay much for it.

3rd You can pickup a 16TB HDD for 2-3 hundred. You can pick up a 4TB nvme drive for $198 on amazon right now. If that's too expensive for you, maybe just don't install hundreds of modern games simultaneously on your low end setup.

This really is not a big issue.

You're right. It was 30Mb demos from Blizzard by the name of Diablo... Or Starcraft. Or even the beta of Diablo 2 (200Mb?) which was just the Barbarian class so they could beta-test the multiplayer and servers as well as acting as a demo.

Think it's $35 for 10Mbit. (650 down 300 up). Not much of a choice. Though in another state they push for $60/mo

If you say so. Believe it or not, to me $50 is a lot of money still. And i lived on $600/mo for years (700-800 was a good month).

But with most people are in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, asking them to spend hundreds on a drive for space vs oh i don't know, having heat in their house, or food, or gas so they can go to work. I'm pretty sure they will balk. $250+ is a big investment for most people.

Though there are cases 10 years ago, of people not paying rent, and buying $800 in games on their Xbox360 and playing away. I'm sure that won't bite them in the ass later.

Absolutely. If you are struggling for necessities you should not be buying any AAA video games. It's a completely unnecessary luxury. You don't buy a Ferrari Monza and then complain it's accessories are too pricey.

Similarly I don't think you should be playing CyberPunk if storing it is too expensive for you.

A lot of people like storing installers on external media... Like discs, DVD or bluerays...

Though if you did DVD's with Cyberpunk, 25DVD's is a bit much. 4 Bluerays is a lot, but livable.

So? A lot of people like diamonds too. What's your point?

That the space on the drive isn't used unless you're planning on playing it, when you have some form of external media? (And you don't need to download a game for a week first anymore).