I pre-loaded the PC version of this via Steam and installed it, and it's 59 GB; the largest game I've ever downloaded. Maybe this will show my ignorance on this matter, but are there any games that have been this large? I remember Middle-earth and Wolfenstein being in the 30s, but never one nearing 60. Are there any other games that have surpassed this?

I recall Force Unleashed being large for some really dumb reason.

There are no current games I can think of that exeed 60gb, though Star Citizen is supposed to have a 100 gig install.

Damn! 59 gigs? Sooner or later we'll need a better way of storing our data. Either that, or hard drives in the future should be VERY VERY cheap.

I believe that GTA V will decrypt (Steam release) to 65 (ish) GB.

Biggest games I can think of are Force Unleashed and Shadow of Mordor.
They were both in the mid to late 30s. The former was due to the game being a port of the PS3 release, with next to no compression on it's cutscenes.

There are some PS4 games that are equal size. Battlefield 4 was like 45GB GTA V for PS4 was like 56GB. I think Destiny was pretty large as well.

Titanfall was in the 50s but a lot of it was uncompressed audio for some ungodly reason.

But yeah, games are getting huge. I'm not surprised. Honestly, I'm baffled by people being surprised by this. Most console games are getting printed on Blu-rays for a while now. It's natural for PC games to have a similar size.

You can get a 2TB hard drive for $80. That's already very very cheap.

Is this a surprise? GTA V for PS4 was 56 Gigs, and this is a more detailed version of that. The world is giant, there's tons of music...doesn't seem too crazy to me.

@zelyre: I think it's because there's only one install for all regions, so the game includes the audio files for all supported languages.

NBA 2k15 was around 40 gb but it would make sense that today's game would start reaching the 50 gb palteau of a blu-ray disc.

Fuck that, my internet service has a monthly limit on downloads. I think that would put it over already this month, as I share this internet service with other people.

Reminds me i want to get a 2 or 4 tb drive and live the dream of all my games installed at once.

That's crazy. I feel bad for fellow games that have internet caps/limits like I do. While I don't share the common sentiment that digital-only is a bad thing, I do, however, hope they figure something out for those with caps/slower internet. There's little more debilitating for a gamer than to buy a game, bring it home, and then find out there's a mandatory patch ON TOP of everything else in order to access a large portion of the game; if not they entire thing.

For example, I use T-Mobile's 5GB/mo Mobile Hotspot. It's $10/mo more than my normal bill to have unlimited (un-tethered) data, and a 5GB (tethered) a month limit. I normally try to use a public hotspot to download large files like WoW patches and etc, as my connection is great for just normal playing. It's when large patches hit that really hurts me. I was really looking forward to Halo: The Masterchief Collection (ignoring the obvious crapshoot it was for a long time) & had to completely pass on it due to it's huge day-one patch.

I really do wish that sometimes companies would make some sort of alternative to requiring such a large bandwidth commitment to play their games. I'd take a little station at your local Gamestop/Wal-mart where you plug in a 64GB USB (now that they aren't astronomically expensive) and can download the patch to apply on my console/PC later. Hell, I'd even pay a buck or two for the convenience!

I wouldn't be shocked if they ballooned the size from some study about piracy to filesize.

I keep my large Steam backups on a NAS and top of the crop is FFXIII at 49.4GB.... for pretty corridors.

The thing that makes me sad/angry is that GTAV killed a 1/6 of my data cap. US ISPs need to get better.

MMOs can get to that size without too much issue. It's been awhile, but I think a current WoW client is over 50GB. I think Elder Scrolls Online is around 80GB.

ISPs really need to get their shit together in terms of bandwidth caps. I didn't think anything of it until my ISP instituted a cap (which I thankfully managed to get out of thanks to securing a better deal for more bandwidth), but it's fucking awful if you play a lot of PC games.

That is a LOT of gigglebytes.

Advanced Warfare was like 46GB so I'm not surprised at huge sizes for games really at this point (even though that's still pretty crazy that GTA V is 59GB).

Max Payne 3 was massive too.

Yup 4k textures mean that you need 4x the space of a 1080p texture. Also, a blu-ray is 55gb so these sizes are going to be more common from now on.

Can't say that I'm surprised

I just checked my steam folder. Largest game there is Shadow of Mordor at 53GB, so GTA's not too far in the lead. Games are big, and getting bigger I guess. The fact that devs don't have to worry about the poor bastards with 20GB PS3s and 360s with no HD at all any more probably means they'll get bigger faster. Good thing SSDs are getting cheaper just as fast.

Also, I started my download around 6mbps and now I'm not even getting 100kbps. Steam never goes below 5mbps for me on this connection, so it looks like I'm not downloading through Social Club ever again! It's just as well I relented on my opposition to pre-orders on this one: If I'm lucky I might have the game downloaded by the day after release. Maybe?

Many 40 & 50 gig games already out there, so this is as surprising as the sun coming up this morning.

Wolfenstein was about 45 GB'S I think. Maybe physical media will start making a comeback if this really is what's going to happen?

Boy, I sure am glad I don't have download limits.

@believer258: I sure as hell hope not. And it also seems pretty unlikely. I mean, you can get a 3TB drive for $85 right now. That's $0.03 per GB. a decade ago, storage costs were 10 times that, and "big games" were about a tenth as big. This really isn't a new development, relatively speaking. Sure, things get a bit complicated once you factor SSDs in, but they're nonessential, and it requires very little effort to maintain a smaller SSD with a higher volume HD for additional storage and swap between the two.

I remember back when a double CD game seemed huge and that's less than two gigs. Times change, storage devices get bigger and cheaper, we endure.

Well, the Steam version of the first F.E.A.R is about 17GB, so...

The standard BT Infinity 1 package has a 40GB a month limit. I'm on Infinity 2 which is unlimited but I still backup games larger than 15GB even though it wouldn't take me that long to download them.

Old habits die hard, I guess...

@pcorb That's reminded me to back that sucker up. Steam's telling me 55012MB.

Max Payne 3 was fucking huge too.

With my country bumpkin internet and if I didn't do anything else with my connection that would probably take me almost a month to download.

@ottoman673: yah and it ran really well so I'm hoping maybe this is the same situation.

Titanfall, Final Fantasy XIII, Max Payne 3, The Evil Within, and Wolfenstein all went 30+, or close to it, all for different reasons.
I'm no software expert, but here's why I think the sizes for these games were particularly large.
Max Payne 3/FF13: PRE-RENDERED CINEMATICS GALORE.
Titanfall: Uncompressed audio files.
Wolfenstein/The Evil Within: MEGATEXTURES, or something.

Anyone who bought a key that activates in the Rockstar Social Club and not Steam, be warned that the download client is complete shit. The longer I leave it running the slower the download speed gets, down to 10KB/s, and I have to pause and resume it to get it back up to speed. DO NOT CLOSE THE DOWNLOAD CLIENT. I was doing this until I noticed it reset me from 35GB to 25GB. You have been warned.

We need to figure out a more efficient way to compress files. From what I understand, most of the size these days comes from the crazy amount of audio files for different languages. It's not a problem for console games on disc, but that is becoming more and more of an issue with downloading Steam games and whatever you get from the PlayStation or Xbox store. They either need to find a way to compress that file size without destroying the quality, or just sell versions with specific languages, or maybe allow you to select which language(s) you want to be installed like they do with most business software.

Yeah that's too much. I would be okay with it if they like came out and said they did all they could and it still ended up 60 gigs. But yeah, that's too much.

Wolfenstien the New Order was around 50.

I would be thrilled with 59gb.

So I pre-loaded the game before it released, and I had 25gb left on my 128gb SSD at the end of the pre-load. I just came home for the first time since it was unlocked: to a warning from Windows that I was out of disk space. Sure enough, I had mere MB left - and Steam wanted MORE to update GTA 5. After I somehow cleared out 7gb, and let Steam try to update again...I ran out of space again minutes later.

Windows said I had 1.5 MEGABYTES left on my SSD. So I gave up and decided I'd have to download it again onto my storage RAID array. I enter Steam and tell it to delete GTA 5 local content....magically my SSD has 91.5gb free now. It wasn't even done downloading shit...

This is insane.

@telexen: If its not too late I would re-download on your SSD. It wont have to unpack anymore since it doesn't need to go through the preload process anymore and should just download straight to your drive.