Gears of War 4 is 80GB large, the Xbox One version of Quantum Break is around 100GB if you download the live action episodes, and chances are Cyberpunk 2077 will be twice the size as The Witcher 3.

This is unfortunately to be expected at this point since there's a sizeable group of people wanting the best looking and sounding AAA games. Pretty annoying overall with the data cap I have right now, but I'm in no hurry to get most of these games anyway. There's still plenty of smaller games out there that we can play.

How big is The Witcher 3? Bigger than 2 and Skyrim? What is the average AAA game these days? (file size)

Its kind of ludicrous considering the game(s) in question -- recent CoD games only last maybe 3-4 hours max. and for such a huge download and install? no thanks
Im actually wondering whether devs bother to have a go at managing the size of the game files at all?... bloat......

hehehehehecries.

So true ;p

(I gave up after first, will wait months until I see a gap in the "patches")

2 minutes.

Completely agree.
Got this cheap other morning, then I saw the size of the DL.

It can wait until I've played some other games before I'll clog the internots with it.

My thoughts are that we can expect games overall on average to increase in size over time roughly in conjunction with the average size and cost of storage space increasing over time, the average PC's ability to load/manipulate the data manageably, and the bandwidth speed and cap of the average Internet service connection for the target consumer the game is intended for.

Traditionally the performance of CPUs, size of hard disks, amount of average memory, and other factors in computers have doubled roughly every 18 months for decades (often referred to as Moore's Law), although this seems to be starting to slow down in recent years. It stands to reason that software vendors will target their software towards modern trends like this in general.

So last year on the higher end of the scale there were games coming out in the 50-60GB range, with The Witcher 3, GTA5, Titanfall to name a few on the large size of things. Go forward 18 months from there and we get to right about now. Having a game come out at 100-120GB is right about what I would expect to start happening, and in another 18 months somewhere around April 2018 I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a new game coming out that is 200-240GB in size. There will always be games following current hardware trends like this, and games pushing the envelope forever forward.

One can go back in time to the 1980s and study hard disk size trends, CPU/RAM performance/size trends and compare with what video games demanded at the time, then go forward one year after another and see a correlation between the hardware trend and video game system requirements and size of data are all the way up through the present day.

I would expect this trend to continue far into the future, and wouldn't expect anything different to happen personally.

Looking forward to picking that up when it hits another rock bottom sale in the future. Glad to hear the game is massive to make it that much more worth the money! I hope game companies start offering a larger download option, maybe re-releasing some of their older games that are like 10-20GB in 4k with expanded content and ultra quality textures, 24bit digital audio at 192kHz etc. for a nice 200GB download. That's what I'm talking about! That's the stuff!

I might even bump my Internet tier up a notch for that sort of thing.

650-700MB for CD, 9GB for DL-DVD. I believe BR is 25/50GB, but I doubt many (if any) PC games come out on Bluray nor ever will because the format never really caught on for software distribution on the PC as content shifted from disk to online kind of subverting the uptake of Bluray becoming ubiquitous on PC. So I wouldn't expect future games in the 100GB+ range to really be available on disk except perhaps as a stub loader that requires Steam or similar to download the actual full game.

Combination of many things really, which will naturally vary from game to game to some degree.

- Larger quantity of video content, both cut-scenes and possibly other FMV usage.
- Higher resolution of video content - full HD and/or 4k for example, with lower compression ratios for higher quality.
- Larger quantity of voiceover content, music
- Higher quality audio, possibly using 192kbit/24bit audio, possibly including surround sound as well.
- Larger game worlds, in particular for huge open world games. Requires more data storage.
- Larger high-resolution textures with lower compression ratios for higher quality graphics.

Many games are creating larger than ever worlds that make use of larger amounts of unique graphics/textures so there is less "cookie cutter" effect of reusing and repeating the same graphics over and over again. There's still reuse, but they're able to have more unique content because today's hardware is capable of handling it.

Another factor is that some companies may not store their data in the most efficient format for whatever reason. I've heard rumours that Titanfall's massive size is due to poorly compressed audio to act as a deterrent for pirates trying to pirate the game. I doubt that is true though as it would make no sense to discourage piracy by making a game 50GB to force people to buy it instead who then have to install your 50GB game. :)

For just about any game though, the majority of the size of the game is due to video, audio, and image/texture data, so as we have computers that are able to process more video, more audio, and more graphical data, game developers are going to capitalize on that to make their games continually push the envelope in the audio-visual department.

Well, a double layer, double sided DVD can hold up to 17 GB.

The full download of The Witcher 3 with the expansions, DLC and all bonus items is about 48GB currently. The game itself alone is about 25GB.

Skyrim was only about 5GB, so The Witcher 3 is somewhat significantly larger. The Witcher 2 is approx 27GB, roughly half the size of the complete Witcher 3 GOTY more or less.

It's hard to say what the average AAA game size is because they vary greatly depending on the genre and type of game so it is all over the place. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd guess the average size to be somewhere between 30-40GB currently however it's likely not easy to get a list of all AAA games and their sizes and average them all year by year without some serious effort. :)

There was similar region locking on DVD drives as I recall, letting you change the setting up to 3 times.

Which is technically true, however not terribly relevant for video games because games are shipped on 4.3 and/or 9GB DL DVDs and double-sided DL DVD never really caught on except in very limited use with video DVDs. The practical non-pedantic answer is that standard sizes of DVDs that are actually used for publishing video games is 4.3GB and 9GB DL.


Some if not all can be set once to regionless also.

Yeah, but tinyE asked how much data you can put on those disks nowadays. It seems wrong to exclude current tech just because it isn't as popular.

As an aside, my computer is now about three years old, and the DVD drive I had can read the 17GB DVDs, and the Blu-Ray drive I have can read the 100GB discs, so they're not *that* unusual. I didn't get very high-end stuff.

Much like Floppy drives, where it was 1.44Mb as declared and technically does have that much space, but the overhead for the filesystem takes up space too, reducing it to something like 1.28Mb.

Using Linux and the like, doing a raw burn of say a tar archive that's heavily compressed, you can get the full size used for data, but it's not easy or random access for most people using it.

2 megabytes unformatted, until they came out with all those oddly high-capacity variants. I remember buying many packs of "2MB floppy disks" that of course were really only 1.44 with filesystem in place.