Streaming needs a strong connection and eats up bandwidth continually so isn't a clear alternative to a big one-off download for users with slow connections and/or bandwidth caps.

World of Warcraft. with expansions over 25 GB. It's only going to get bigger from here out 8p.

Indeed, I once did the math on onlive & it would go through my monthly cap (10GB) in about 3 hours & that's assuming I could do the required Bandwidth speed (hint: I can't)

Source

Yep, reminds me of the time when devs of PS1 games always tried to fill the whole disc and if it was too much they filled a second third or fourth one too, but back then we have not had good compression methods.

Now with stuff like Ogg-Vorbis etc.. I don't understand why this trend is coming back in a multiplied way.
Will retail copies be sold on 2.5'' HDDs in the future? Who knows...
Small and fast HDD-USB-docks are cheap and plug'n'play now anyway,
but since my PC only has USB2.0 it needs a while for a backup of my GoG collection and the reason are games where the size clearly got out of hand.

Really? 0_o
Well, guess I won't be getting it for a while then, at least until I get a hard disk with a couple of terabytes.

Why exactly is it that bloated? How long is the game?

Isn't the 30/40GB thing becoming the norm?

This time we'll have multiple Blu rays!

Good question, I find it a bit odd that a lot of these new games (from this year and last year) are fairly linear with medium sized levels but are two or three times the size of large open world games of just three or four years ago.

That's what baffles me as well.

Content wise there appears to be nothing to justify a large file size, yet they are ridiculously bloated.
I guess all of it goes into graphics...which is stupid.

AH the old days of 500mb installs. It's a fairly common thing very what I have seen with all the new games I have played recently. God knows why, they're nice looking but nothing that justifies a big install.

ISP's in Finaldn providing mobile connections are currently against is because the current 3G setups can't really support massive amounts of data people want to use them for and that's in many places ISP's own fault, when they started to claim that 3G is a viable alternative for wired connections, at the same time when they begun to cut down wires. It's a mess they made themselves, but are not willing to admit too readily in the public.

Theoretically though now that more frquences are freed up and the new 5G coverages are fully realized in the future the the data transfer should ease up a bit.

Basically though, the web is getting more and more necessary in daily life by each year. This pretty much means, that it won't take long for goverments everywhere to start demanding cheap or free basic, unlimited connections to every household. If that means 1, 10 or 100 mbit connections remains to be seen, but in most likely case a basic connection will be seen as modern human right. There already are arguments for it from time to time.

Yeah I agree. All I can figure is that they're compressed poorly (and even uncompressed they shouldn't really be that large as far as I can tell) or that cinematics and voice acting make up most of the file size. Just for reference, Sleeping Dogs is a fairly recent game with high quality (even compared to new games) graphics, plenty of cinematics and voice acting, a lot of quests, a large amount of music and a decent sized open world, yet it's not even a full seven gigabytes.

True, but the basic connections won't necessarily be unlimited (as in, downloading dozens of gigabytes of entertainment at high speed for free).

In nanny states like Finland, it is possible that the state would decide to provide a "free" connection to everyone, for which everyone pays in taxes. Or a more probable scenario, internet connections will cost money as they do now (maybe based on data transfers), but for the poorest people the state will pay the internet bills (just like they already pay for their rents etc.).

That's why CDNs sprang up. In most cases they own a datacenter that's adjacent to the ISP, so there's rather than having hundreds and millions of copies going over the internet, it's basically one per data center and then from the datacenter it's just the ISPs pipe to the consumer.

It's something that you're more likely to notice when you'[re cruising the internet, but Netflix et. al. do that as well.