10 games that will destroy your hard drive space

On Dec 27, 2021

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Many of the latest popular games now come with install sizes of 100GB or more, which means they can take up a hefty bit of capacity on typical storage drives.

The main reason for this is the inclusion of large 2K and 4K textures that have bumped up sizes significantly in recent years.

According to PC Gamer, a 50GB game only has room for 800 unique texture maps, while a 150GB game can accommodate 2,400.

With the latest graphics cards and gaming consoles capable of supporting up to 4K resolution, game developers don’t want to be beaten by their competitors in terms of visual fidelity.

While the quality of gameplay is undoubtedly the deciding factor in measuring a game’s success, many consumers might not even take an interest if it does not look good.

One clear-cut example of this is the backlash over the first trailer for 343 Industries’ Halo: Infinite, which saw many complain over graphics that looked outdated, particularly for a title that was set to make its debut on the next-generation Xbox Series X consoles.

The studio delayed the game’s launch by a year, and the resulting improvements to graphics made between the original release date and its actual launch have been praised by fans and critics alike.

The video below from the YouTube channel TheNeonArcade shows some of the improvements made with the extra development time.

Halo Infinite’s total install size now stands at about 61GB, but it might have been smaller had these improvements not been made.

Suppose you are an avid gamer who likes to hop between playing the latest, graphically-impressive titles. In that case, you will need a high-capacity drive to keep up with the growing file sizes unless you plan to keep deleting and redownloading titles.

Even with a 100Mbps line, you can only download at around 12.5MB/s, which means a 100GB game would still take about 2 hours and 13 minutes to download if you aren’t doing anything else on the connection.

While most gamers would prefer to play off a solid-state drive for better loading times, the increasing size of games might be enough to consider more affordable external hard drives that you can copy your games to when you aren’t playing them.

Transferring game files when you need them would typically be a quicker option than having to redownload them as the latest external hard drives and USB transmission speeds have read and write speeds well above 12.5MB/s.

wd-mybook-hard-drive-hack-headline-image — An large hard drive is cheaper than equivalent internal solid-state drives, making it a good option if cost is an issue.

Fortunately, some games have shrunk in size due to optimisation and compression applied following their launch, giving players’ drives some more breathing room.

An example of this includes Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, which grew to 170GB on PC at one stage. A May 2021 update cut this down to around 83GB.

While Activision Blizzard has also worked to reduce the infamous package sizes of its latest Call Duty titles, these have remained relatively chunky unless players were willing to give up the campaigns or high-resolution textures.

Below are 10 of the biggest PC games by install size with their high-resolution texture packs included. We’ve also calculated roughly how long it would take to download them using a 100Mbps connection.

We only used base game sizes and standalone expansions and did not include sizes with DLCs or third-party add-ons. The sizes might also vary slightly due to recent updates or changes made after the time of writing this article.