In years prior there were a lot of games and a shifting understanding of what hardware they can require. While gfx needs changed rapidly, hard drive space requirements went up steadily, predictably. As most of us have long abandoned physical media sales and use digital downloads instead, this number has stopped to be defined by the medium’s capacity.
Before and now we had outliers like MMORPGs and movie-like games requiring more estate, while other games like Deep Rock Galactic needing just 4GBs, but there always was some number of gigabytes you as a consumer thought a new game would take.
Where’s that sweet spot now for you?
For me, it’s 60GB, or a 40-80GB range. Something less or more than that causes questions and assumptions. I have a lot of space, but I’d probably decline if some game would exceed 2x of my norm or 120GB of storage.
I don’t really think that I have a range that’s anywhere near that narrow.
First, some of my favorite games are roguelikes (e.g. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or Caves of Qud), and they often have very few assets, which is where all the data in larger games comes from.
It looks like the largest release of Cataclysm (the one with the graphics and sounds) unpacks to be 586MB. Caves of Qud — actually, I’m surprised that it’s this large — has a 1.4GB directory in Steam after installation.
I have a hard time imagining a lower bound (short of maybe demoscene type stuff, where I’d be surprised that stuff could fit into so little space). But I have a hard time imagining avoiding a game because it’s too small.
Second, I don’t think that there are any commercial games out there that are going to cause me to not play them due to storage space. Starfield is probably the largest I’ve done, and while it uses enough disk space that I’m not going to leave it installed if I don’t plan to play it anytime soon, it’s not an issue to store it.
https://twinfinite.net/features/biggest-games-all-time-ranked-install-size/
This says that Starfield has a 125 GB install.
The largest that they have listed there is ARK: Survival Evolved , at 435 GB. That does seem a little excessive to me, but, I mean, you can get a 4TB NVMe drive on Amazon right now for ( checks ) ~$200, so that’s really $25 in storage, and when you’re not playing it, you can just uninstall it and put something else there. As gaming hardware goes, $25 just isn’t that big a deal.
In theory, I could imagine some sort of game that procedurally-generates a dynamic world as one explores that has massive save files or something, something in the vein of Minecraft-style games. Disk space there could be theoretically unbounded. So you could design a hypothetical game that I’d object to. But…I don’t really think that there’s really a practical limitation that excludes games for me today today.