Looking at PCs and standalone hard drives, you might have trouble finding anything with less than 512 GB or even 1 TB of storage. For most activities, this amount of drive space should be more than enough. But gaming is becoming an exception.

When 1 TB drives were initially introduced, you could save plenty of games to that level of storage, but these days, you’ll be lucky if 1 TB can house ten games. What happened? The answer is increased game file sizes, but that question raises another: Why are game file sizes increasing?

Exponentially increasing texture resolution means exponentially increasing file sizes

4K resolution might look pretty, but those textures can eat up more space than most games.

The main culprit behind the ever-ballooning game file sizes is game assets and textures. Developers can now create models with more polygons and more detailed textures than ever before. And the more polygons and pixels a model utilizes, the more bytes its file requires.

What we think of as textures are actually the combinations of several computer graphics techniques, including bump maps that simulate bumps and normal maps that simulate how light interacts with those bumps. When combined and wrapped around models, these maps make game assets look more realistic and more impressive.

But this technique requires a lot of storage, because the game has to save multiple textures for every model. Moreover, textures with higher resolutions take up even more space because of their additional detail. 4K resolution textures have over four times the pixels of standard 1080p resolution textures, which means their files are four times as large. This applies to everything from level geometry to weapons and enemies: the more assets developers produce for a game, the more hard drive space is required for every 4K texture.

Take Far Cry 6 as an example. The base game requires 91 GB, and the DLC only adds a total of 8 GB. However, the optional HD Texture Pack adds an enormous 62 GB to the total package – over two-thirds of the base game’s size, all to push your computer’s 4K resolution capabilities. Without an exorbitantly large SSD drive, you probably wouldn’t be able to play any game at 4K resolution, but then again, if you don't have a 4K monitor, you won't need 4K textures, either.

Music to your ears requires more bytes

Save a few gigabytes by only downloading one supported language

Audio files generally don’t take up as much space as texture files, partially because there’s no such thing as 4K audio (yet). But, since sound effects are so crucial to the gaming experience, every game needs a load of audio files. This can quickly add up.

Depending on genre and length, a game can have hours of voiced content, ranging from cutscenes to ambient character dialogue. And the more voice acting in a game, the more space it requires. Baldur’s Gate 3, for instance, takes up 145 GB of space, 17.6 GB of which are devoted to one language (English in this case). And what happens when you try to install updates that change dialogue to other languages? ShreddedNerd tested this several years ago when Call of Duty Modern Warfare took up 219 GB. After installing sound packs for every supported language, the game ballooned to 344 GB. That’s about 10.5 GB per language for twelve languages. For the sake of comparison, 2011’s original Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 only required 16 GB, audio and all. The fact that Modern Warfare’s audio files are almost as big as a previous Call of Duty game, in its entirety, demonstrates just how much space modern audio fidelity is eating up.

Performance and loading times are currently more important than saving space

Modern games that take up more file space are easier on the GPU

Video game visuals are more than just pretty graphics; a game is also judged by the engine’s ability to load levels quickly and without straining the graphics processor. While developers have plenty of tricks they can use as shortcuts, these tricks tend to increass file size.

One of the more noteworthy obstacles to fast loading times is to do with redundancies. All games use assets, and many of them are repeated multiple times throughout a game world. When developers have redundant assets or models, they have two choices: they can place the asset in a level multiple times (and possibly in multiple levels) or use a reference that calls the asset from a library within the game’s code. The latter option saves file space since the game engine only has to memorize one copy of the asset.

However, since the engine has to look up the item every time players encounter the reference, this technique increases load times. Since cutting down on load times is a major concern, many developers opt for placing the assets multiple times throughout levels. Those asset will require additional storage space whenever they are used.

During the 2019 Game Developers Conference, Insomniac Games’ Elan Ruskin stated that over 50,000 assets, including models and materials, were duplicated throughout Marvel’s Spider-Man. This added over 10 GB of data to the game, which might not sound like much until you realize the title takes up around 45 GB – that’s almost one-fourth of the game. Loading screens would last a lot longer if these duplicated, space-consuming assets weren’t utilized.

The other challenge to game file sizes is mipmapping. Short for multum in parvo (which is Latin for “much in little”) mapping, this technique reduces graphics processor loads when players view far-away areas. Essentially, the further away an asset, the lower its texture resolution and polygon count. In order for mipmapping to work, each asset needs multiple models and textures to be saved alongside each other in the game data, so they can be swapped out depending on the distance to the player. This takes up extra space, but it keeps processing to an absolute minimum, which in turn maximizes frame rates.

On the flipside, general file compression can affect how much space files take up. Compressed models and textures just don’t require as many bytes, but whenever a game loads them, the engine has to unpack the asset, resulting in blurry textures and low-poly models which then smooth out in a matter of seconds. The less compression a game engine uses, the faster it loads, but the more space each asset requires. And, some assets can’t be compressed without significantly affecting the end result. Compressed audio doesn’t sound too good, but much like language packs, numerous uncompressed audio files add up. The original Titanfall demonstrates this, as the game was nothing but a series of small-ish multiplayer maps. However, the game required 48 GB at launch because 35 GB of that was uncompressed audio files.

The more content a game has, the more space it requires

Adding new weapons, cosmetics, and levels every few months tends to add up

Live service games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone see the culmination of every issue that increases a game’s file size. Every new character skin and weapon model has its own set of polygons and textures, in addition to mipmaps that other players see during shootouts. And – this is just a bit of speculation here – since these games are free-to-play battle royale titles, both games likely use a ton of redundancies to make sure any player can load levels as fast as possible, regardless of platform.

Another issue is that many developers just don’t compress files as much as possible. Part of this is that, since studios have to meet strict deadlines, they don’t have the time to compress everything. Some studios might not feel that file compression is important anymore thanks to advances in storage technology. Every year, hard drives and solid-state drives get bigger, and older models get cheaper. Why bother compressing a file when someone can easily purchase a new drive?

Changing priorities and changing hard drives?

These days, most developers are focused on maximizing fidelity and don’t have to worry about making their games fit on physical media anymore. This shift in priorities means developers don’t have to worry about file sizes anymore, but it means that gamers will have to worry about fitting games on their hard drives instead.