How much do the games released in 2023 weigh? Leaving aside whether they are better or worse, we are going to focus on the size of their PC version. ‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’ occupies about 130 GB. ‘Forspoken’, around 120 GB. ‘Redfall’ and ‘The Last of Us: Part 1’ remain at about 100 GB and ‘Atomic Heart’, about 90 GB. Games are taking up more and more space and that, when we talk about PCs, can be a problem for not exactly a few users.
And it is that at the same time that the space occupied by video games has been growing more and more, the storage capacity of users’ computers has remained more or less stable. Yes, it’s true that, according to Steam’s hardware survey, almost half of gamers have 1TB of storage or more, but the other reality is that it is relatively normal to have between 250 and 499 GB of total capacity. Destroying that storage by installing games is simply too easy.
Having many games installed is not so easy anymore
Let’s imagine a case. Let’s assume that we’re playing ‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivors’, that we like ‘Destiny 2’, that we have ‘Warzone 2.0’ installed to play games with friends and ‘League of Legends’ because well, it’s ‘LoL’ and always like Well, just with that, which isn’t that much either, we will have occupied neither more nor less than 279,6 GB. If you have a computer with 500 GB of storage, that means more than half of its total capacity, and that’s without counting the rest of the programs you may have installed.
Of those 279.6 GB, 130 GB belong to the latest installment of ‘Star Wars Jedi’ and 105 GB correspond to Bungie’s looter shooter, which is not a strictly new game by any means, but one of the most popular titles on Steam. For those players who have a capable computer with a lot of storage, this is not a problem. However, for many others, it can be. And titles like ‘Starfield’ or ‘Diablo IV’ have not yet arrived, which do not aim to be exactly light.
In my particular case, I have a 1 TB NVMe M.2 SSD, and that’s it. I currently have ‘Battlefield 2042’ installed which is about 75GB and ‘Apex Legends’ which is about 53GB or so. Two games, nothing more, occupy about 10% of the computer’s capacity. My PC ranks among the majority in Steam’s hardware survey (49.32% of users have 1TB or more), but for a significant body of people this would be the same as having your storage maxed out.
Steam Hardware Survey (April 2023).
According to this Steam survey, 23.18% of users have between 250 and 499 GB of storage, while 14.62% have between 750 and 999 GB. With this space, and seeing how the size of games (especially single-player games) has grown, having several games installed is a practically impossible thing because, unlike consoles, the computer is used for many other things that, surprise, also require space.
Because yes, you could think that if you need space to try a new game (let’s think of a Game Pass premiere) you uninstall an old game, download the new one, try it, uninstall it and download and install the old one again. . On paper, the idea is not bad, but there is an additional factor to take into account: the download speed. In Spain, it depends on the study we look at, but according to Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index, the average download speed in Spain is 178.40 Mbps. Downloading 130 GB with that speed is no small feat.
The “plus” part is that the most popular multiplayer games don’t take up too much space. For example, ‘League of Legends’ occupies 22 GB, ‘CS:GO’ about 30 GB, ‘Fortnite’ about 32 GB and ‘Valorant’ more or less the same. Leaving aside heavier options, such as ‘Destiny 2’ or ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’ with ‘Warzone 2.0’, which together occupy about 100 GB, yes it is sustainable to have a handful of multiplayer games installed at once. On the other hand, the price of storage has not stopped falling, although it is true that in recent years there has been some stagnation.
what options exist
The easiest option would be to expand the storage of the PC. On a laptop it is somewhat more complex, but on a desktop PC the easiest thing to do is to add additional storage. For around 100 euros it is easy to find a 1 TB SSD and some 4 TB HDDs, which can be interesting for storing content. If we value loading times, an SSD is a good option, but if we value storing more and more games and we don’t mind that the transfer speed and loading times are somewhat higher, a large capacity HDD can be a good option. idea.
On the other hand, the second option would be to go to the game in the cloud. It is true that this implies paying a subscription in addition to the game itself, but it allows access to all the games at any time without having to take up space on the PC and, in some cases, playing with better graphic quality as long as the connection is good. (and is available, of course).
Image | Xataka with Midjourney
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Via | pcgamer
