Me too, but with faster and faster internet connections we might face this "opportunity" which would resolve the problem of really huge install files (kind of).

130GB means it's horribly unoptimized, and chances are that Wolfenstein 3D is a better game anyway.

When I hear people complaining that the Nintendo NX's supposed 32 and 64GB cartridges at launch are 'too small' I start to wonder about the talent in and focus of this industry.

CODIW is 90gb? Of what? Uncompressed textures and audio? Shitty code? We have lossless compression formats for a reason. All this disreguard for your hard drive space for what will undoubtedly be yet another short, shallow experience...

How big is The Witcher 3's install size again?

24 gigs, 35 with all the dlc. Which gets you a semi-open world and roughly 100+ hours of gameplay.

Dunno how console AAA games always manage to get as fat as they are.

You are looking to have a ton of bells and whistles in your game. Assuming you compress all assets (textures and audio), you need X amount of processing power and Y amount of space. If you have all the assets uncompressed, you need X-Z processing power by Y+A storage space. Storage space is cheaper than processing power (assuming you even can change the processing power), so using uncompressed assets allows you to use a sliver more of processing power.
The trick is obviously finding the correct ratio of compression that allows you to use all the bells and whistles you wish to use.

Oh, and EFIGS. Some people are not happy with English language only, so you have to have audio in other languages as well. That does add quite a bit to the needed space.

Download or install size?

Steam tells me it's using 51GB of the hard drive. I do have all DLCs.

My point exactly. Though I thought TW3 with DLC was closer to 50gb? It's not just big in terms of gameplay but TW3 has tons of very high definition assets...

A lot of these big AAA devs are just sloppy, they'll just brute force build their games with no thought (or understanding) for optimization.

Yup, absolutely. I bought a new DVD burner about 18 months ago as I needed it for installation of old CD/DVD based video games mainly and it was like $15, so I'll probably have one in my computers for some years to come but I definitely wont be buying any new software on disc, nor any movies or TV shows. I am still partial to audio CDs however (call me old-school), however I haven't bought any of those for probably 5-6 years either. :)

It is possible to make ISO images of many old games. Any which are DRM-free or have mild DRM may be usable in ISO form with the appropriate image mounting software installed, and those which have DRM can be often bypassed by visiting Google in search of solutions for the given game, albeit one has to be very careful about 3rd party solutions which may come with "bonus" software that isn't so desirable if you know what I mean.

Yeah, it would suck for those with crappy Internet but I think that one of two scenarios is more likely to happen than the industry embracing Bluray as a distribution format for PC games in the future (except perhaps in special one-off scenarios perhaps).

1) They will market their games to the majority and if the majority have good Internet connections they will just call losing those that have crappy Internet a part of doing business and focus on those who have a bare minimum and above in terms of connectivity.

2) They will make their games available as lower bandwidth streaming services like Origin Access or that newer Playstation streaming service. As long as people have the bandwidth to handle that they'll be ok.

For people that can't handle either situation though because they're on dialup or have a highly restrictive cap or similar, I'm afraid that they're probably going to end up thrown under the truck unless the problem is so widespread that it ends up affecting the game publisher's bottom lines. With games coming out at 60-100GB right now and going on to be in the top 5/10/20 list of most played games on a continuous day in day out basis though I suspect that publishers have already embraced the new norm and thrown people that can't keep up under the truck.

Hopefully in countries and smaller regions where there are inadequate Internet services, they will become updated in the near future to overcome that however.

Well the withcer 3 has a shitton of bells and whistles and they are working just fine at that size both on console and pc, don't understand how games can be noticeably bigger yet offer the same or less in amounts of bells and whistles.

Download, though the final install folder is 38 gigs. For some reason windows has problems autodetecting the size or what it is supposed to detect since it gives me 3 entries at 9.8 each.

Don't new games contain compressed data for the installers anymore? O_o
Do they only use lossless formats?
Do they include too many languages?

For me even 30Gb seems way too much..

Different bells and whistles. From what I recall (which may be incorrect), TW3 does not have physics based destruction or ragdoll physics, and it definitely doesn't have and multiplayer component (which does include automatic audio calls). I think the CoD series have been adding those, but I'll have to ask my nephew about it.
TW3 also does have quite a bit more requirements than CoD:IW (at least according to the info I found on the net), though as you said that doesn't exist when talking about consoles.

Compression is mostly CPU bound so disk performance shouldn't really impact the timing of the operation per se. The three biggest factors that affect compression performance are CPU clock frequency, the number of cores (for fully parallelized compression/decompression implementations), and very importantly - the size of the CPU cache. If one has truly slow disks that can't saturate the CPU's capabilities or perhaps old USB1 or USB2 flash sticks then the performance of them can be an issue, but SSD vs modern HDD shouldn't notice any real difference for compression I don't believe on a decent system. It might be fun to test this across different systems and drive categories/connectivity to see how they fare on a given system though too, as well as changing the number of cores available to the compressor. I used to do benchmarking eons ago for fun with things like that, but nothing in recent times. :) Back in the day at least, the bottleneck was the CPU though.

I've got the 120GB SSD drive and 3 2TB HDDs (WD Caviar Black). The HDDs were a huge performance boost from what I was used to, which was drives in the 30-60MBps range, as it jumped me up to 150MBps peak. That alone would have been an impressive enough perf boost for my computing along with this new machine. 2 friends talked me into researching if SSD would be worthy for me, and I concluded that the technology had finally gotten to the point of reliability vs. cost vs. size etc. for me to embrace it. While my SSD drive is 500MBps and that is quite a noticeable jump from the newer HDDs I had, the zero-seek time latency is where they really shine and it gave stunning OS startup and application load times that were not something I was really complaining about per se, but once I saw it I was intensely happy with the results considering it cost me only $100. I was sold first-hand on SSD being the single biggest perf boost you can throw on just about any system to give it a good shot in the arm. :) It's one of those things where even if you don't need it per se, you can't help but put your seatbelt on and say "OH YEAH! THIS IS THE SHIT!" :)

I do hate perpetually buying new storage media and then relentlessly filling it up, buying more, filling it up, etc. though. I'm tired of hoarding stuff like that. Nowadays I've gotten in the habit of not downloading anything I'm not going to use in the next hour/day/week, and making bookmarks to it instead or similar unless it is something that was hard to find or I fear might not be available in the future easily etc. but that's rarely the case these days online. Now I consume data/content I have and then delete it unless I have a strong reason to hold on to it. I don't want to have 50 hard disks full of shit I'll never likely use again anymore. I'm perpetually fighting with out of disk on 6TB which is ridiculous. Time to delete shit. :)

I think it would quite literally take me 3-4 weeks to download that 130GB package. And that's if we didn't use the internet connection for anything else that entire time. Or I could go into town and leech off family member's 60Mb connections.

But this is what we get when we ooo and aahh over increased realism in games. "They're lapping it up - make the games bigger!!"

It actually does have physics both for enviromental objects and enemies (It even has that nvidia hair thing, and it works with geralt's beard and wolves), they're not as sophisticated as GTA V's I guess but still pretty advanced. I don't think that really adds much to the size of the game though as it's mostly in-engine stuff.

The audio does probably add up much more, but even then The witcher 3 has a TON of voiced dialogue, it's insane how much it has. Cod has a campaign that at most last about 10 hours, let's add another 10 hours for the multiplayer exclusive stuff. Other than maybe having more high fidelity gun/exploson sounds I still really can't see how it takes up the same let alone more size than the witcher.

If the reason for said storage requirement is (again) uncompressed audio, then the download should be quite smaller. Still a hefty one for sure, but not that big.
And do recall that the 130GB is for 2 games, not one.
Thank you for the correction. And does the NVidia hair thing work in consoles (which use AMD from what I recall) or is that a PC only thing?
And no, using detailed hair work doesn't add up to the space used, it adds up to the required processing power, thus you may wish to go with uncompressed textures to balance it.