Why Are Games So Big?

I was just thinking, why are the current generation of games so much bigger than the previous generation?

What are they putting on those Blu-ray to fill them up? Why are some games 5x the size but don't really look that much better than their last gen counterparts?

Is it really just higher resolution textures, better lighting and particle effects, etc.?

You answered your own question. With fidelity comes file size.

Fancy textures and shaders take up a lot more space than you might think.

Disc space. Previously decelopers would compress stuff and decompress on the fly while you played games. Now because discs have so much more space developers are basically saying "FUCK IT" why waste my time and effort compressing things. They all want lossless audio even though they could save massive amounts of space by compression and losing very little quality. Same things on videos and textures so having more disc space means the need for compression has been greatly diminished. The actual size of many textures hasn't magically gotten bigger it's just there's less of a reason to compress.

I guess I just thought there would be more to it, considering they don't look that much better than last gen games.

Certainly not 5x better.... but I guess that has more to do with the hardware. The developers have the extra space so they might as well use it.

Give a creator more resources and they're going to use them. Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest there's been a lot of things that don't really contribute to gameplay like uncompressed audio and including all language data regardless of region. I'm assuming things like these would speed up the creation pipeline, no waiting for audio compression, no separation in disc pressing based on language.

You'd hope that as time goes on they'd start using the additional space to actually fit more content but who knows. What sucks is blu-ray sized downloads when (for many people) the network infrastructure either isn't there yet or is being throttled, capped, and monetized well beyond what is reasonable.

This was a problem with quite a few games on PS3 last gen like Uncharted, Yakuza 4 and L.A. Noire as well as a few steam releases such as The Force Unleashed : Ultimate Sith Edition and I think RAGE was another. I always found the main reason to be uncompressed audio and with The Force Unleashed it was uncompressed audio and multiple languages no matter the region like @villainy points out. Like @junkboy0 says, now that Sony and Microsoft are both using blu-ray, developers probably figure why not take advantage of the extra disc space.

It can really ruin the midnight release excitement when it's a download you won't be able to finish until the next morning. They should allow pre-loading on all games.

I mean to be honest the new consoles aren't that big of an upgrade compared to the old consoles... it all would have looked incredible like 4-5 years ago but now? Not so much.

Higher resolution, Higher framerate, more detailed textures, more assets, etc.

And just think, unless someone revolutionizes compression and file sizes or something I know nothing about, games will keep getting bigger.
I remember being taken aback by Call of Duty 2's 2GB demo size back in the day "It's JUST the DEMO?! And it's 2GB?! WHAT?!" And now GTA comes out and is a whooping 65GB! 65 people!
Shit is going to keep growing, I wont be surprised to see a 100GB game within a few years, not including patches.

The interesting thing to me will be to see what happens down the road with hard drive sizes and internet caps/prices vs. the growing file sizes, will prices shift to match? Will gaming become a much more expensive hobby when one game is someones entire bandwidth cap for a month? Who is to know?

For those of us that grew up around the initial stages of 3D graphics development, we forget that as the tech matures the noticeable improvements in visuals becomes less and less for each theoretical unit of extra grunt put behind making them appear.

We're not going to get the kind of "bang for our buck" in what we actually see by going from the kind of jumps that we, for example, got in the hardware jumps between PS1 and PS2.

This is kind of a hard truth for those of us that grew up gaming and actually seeing the big technological leaps on the screen, but from now on the improvements will be very subtle and more difficult to notice. This is especially true for console gamers since fidelity is not equally shared between certain assets on screen, such as your character model versus background textures in many cases.

To answer your question directly, file sizes are getting bigger partially because of things like international audio files that contain every language a game could be in but it's mostly because the visual assets really are getting that much bigger. We're just getting past the point where we notice it as much.

Also the outlying game that has the DLC on the disc that you pay to unlock.

Wait are you telling me those 100k "unlock" downloads don't have entire maps?!?!?!? :p

Textures. To make your texture twice as nice (double its resolution,) it's gotta be four times as big. To make it three times as nice, nine times as big. Exponential growth. Storage isn't growing quite fast enough. Hopefully by the next generation of consoles or whatever they are, processors will be able to handle some decent real-time ray-tracing and the need for huge textures will be alleviated somewhat.

I imagine all the voice + music needed probably adds up, too.