As a broke college student who is currently budgeting every single day to build a mid range pc, this video is extremely comforting. I wish more youtubers and streamers talked about this instead of bragging about their specs when everyone else is suffering.
@@KagatoAsuka I appreciate the suggestion! Unfortunately a lot of those videos hide a lot of hidden costs and gray market purchases. Plus those videos contain specs that experience the same issues that Charlie is talking about in this video.
I live in an underdeveloped country at an age where I can't legally get a job yet, and my wallet isn't worth 1 tiddlywink from what I've seen in it. There's literally no chance of me being able to even afford a decent pc, let alone whatever kind of fucking space engine game devs nowadays are expecting from modern gamers. It's so nice to see someone talk about this issue, especially when their pc is already pretty good. Thank you Charlie.
i live in a village in Indonesia, do some online stuff to save up money and get a budget computer so i can finally play a game that i want to play, after saving enough money and build the PC i can't even download most of the game that i want because of the ridiculous big size, my internet gonna take like few days to download 1 game, it's insane.
Hell, my new PC I'm waiting to have built has a 4TB and 2TB just so I can split my main stay games up and still have space. It's insane the amount of space they need anymore. Ark is literally the only game I can even give a pass to cuz of the sheer volume of content.
The insane inflation of game file sizes infuriates me so much. The best looking games from ten years ago are still so relatively close to what games look like today and yet they demand literally tenfold the file space. I'm always struggling with making space to have even a few modern games installed, while I have folders full of older titles that amount to not even a single modern title.
Like what exactly? I genuinely can't think of a game that came out ten years ago that looks as good as something like Horizon Forbidden West. GTA 5 was like top of the line at that point in time and now it looks like shit compared to modern games. Really not sure what ten year old games you're referring to that look anywhere near as good as the games that are coming out now.
@@Zack-vi7is I mean sure, GTA 5 doesn't match up to Forbbien West, but its graphic are still solid. That, Skyrim, Portal 2, the original Stanley Parable, all of those have graphics that might not be all the way up to grade of modern games, but they don't look bad, far from it.
@@druidknight1513 there's still a very obvious and significant difference tho. No one said they look bad outright, but compared to the limits modern games are pushing, they're clearly substantially worse.
@@Zack-vi7is gears of war 2 on the xbox 360 looked so fucking good on my friends 800$ 4k 25 inch tv I thought it was a new game when I first popped it in. Halo 3 and mario galaxy from 2007 still look pretty incredible today. Halo reach is another good example. They arent texture to texture good, but the lighting/atsmophere of the game is legit the same. A game from 2010 was like 5 gigs that in todays time is 100g. Stupid as fuck. Especially since 90% of games now arent even half as good as games from 10 years ago.
As a person living in a lower income country, a 3090 graphics card alone costs around 8-10x the average monthly salary. If you're working for minimum wage, that's around 14 months of work without spending a penny. People simply never buy games because no one can afford them. These requirements are so out of control and you can't enjoy anything new. I can only play games from 2000-2012 because I can't afford anything to run modern games. I thought it might be possible if I save money but it's getting so out of touch. It's so so frustrating.
It has definitely become a hobby that is for those who have an expendable income. Those who don't have to worry or think about everything they need to live their everyday life. This means gaming is no longer a hobby it's a luxury.
@@Fredroc57 remember when gaming was the escape from the soul crushing days you face working at a dead end job you make barely enough to keep your head above water? now theyve even taken that from us aswell. Dude everything has gotten to exspensive, even freaking food, is food gonna be a luxury soon too? or just food that tastes good? i guess we will start eating canned food like we feed our animals and theyll reserve the good HEALTHY food for the people who have money, cause they deserve it right? there the smart ones who either had someone pay them through college to be able to have a high paying salary or were smart enough to figure out ways to exploit the rest of us. those are the ones who deserve to not eat chunked meat and ground corn cold out of cans and be leashed around like a metaphorical dog by your asshole of a boss who thinks because hes in that position he can talk to you like youre fudgeing stupid when in reality hes only the boss cause his dad owns a dealership ,yeah thats the guy who deserves the fresh sandwhiches from trader joes and the ps5 not the guys who are making him all his and the companies money with the hard work and passion/dedication it takes to provide the service they sale. while he sits in his office drinking bang energy drinks and playing fudgeing clash of clans on his phone 1300 dollar phone for 6 hours and gets up and walks around the guys working to make sure there staying on task for 15 minutes, then heads outside to smoke a cigar for 45 minutes. then back in to the office to do god knows what with the shades closed for another 3 hours, then gets to go home and play hogwarts legacy and nba 2k23 or 24 or whatever fudgeing year there on at this point on his ps5 when the rest of us cant afford 800 dollar consoles sold by the cornhole resellers on ebay, so were forced to wait until there actually available, 3 years later, so god knows when if ever i can play hogwarts legacy. im really depressed.
I live in the US and that stuff is too expensive, I basically stick with 90's games up to the early 2010's. I don't have any more than like 1 game that's from this decade :/
Yeah... Buying games... I really do that... You know giving my money to a super rich company in a super rich countries where people waste an entire day's worth of food because they already ate themselves into a coma... Where people drink more soda than most other humans can drink water... Bruh, giving money to these people is stupid unless you are one of them. What if they go out of business because people over here pirate it? Who care! There is more where they came from. Also going to be another American or Japanese group looking to cash in on video games. Until I can afford a Lambo I am not giving my money to none of these companies. Not like they can arrest me for going blackbeard on them.
so when I was studying many years ago, my lecturer made us code Java on the worst rigs available... not because he wanted us to suffer, but because he wanted us to use every resource available to us.... it was a great learning experience.
This sounds amazing and you kind of turned my bad experience into a good one with a frame of mind shift. I hated my assembly class. Because first assembly. Second the machines were terrible. But it got to a point you would develop a know of what registers developed what failures when and thinking back. I knew that code backwards and forwards. Crazy triple A studios get paid that much and don't even think twice about their garbage churned out production.
Wasn’t Rollercoaster Tycoon originally built in assembly by one dude (or a small team). That’s why it ran so well for what it was and the resources it had available.
That's the way to do it. To refer to the point made in the video, if Golem has been fitted on to a Nintendo, that should serve as 'the worst rig' and 'ported' to the PC with very low minimum specs. Then they can optimise up, rather than down. In fact, if all games had been doing this, making a 'nintendo/worst rig' version, they would make a lot more sales, so it makes business sense I reckon they just want to slap the largest numbers on the min. requirements as some sort of shareholder appeasement thing, so they can claim they're making cutting edge games that justify investment. I learned to play guitar on a very, very poor quality guitar. The day I got a decent strat, I was blown away by how good I'd become. Same logic here.
@@phillipjones5794correct, one individual. There's a great documentary made by someone on UA-cam about it that I watched a week or two ago. It's insane what that dev was able to accomplish.
This is a place where Nintendo really shines. They optimize the hell out of everything and you can fit multiple of their AAA games on the default Switch storage
This is why I wish Nintendo could bring Pokemon development in-house. But Game Freak owns partial ownership of the IP and they refuse to let it go, like a rotting corpse in rigor mortis. It shows when you compare the performance of BOTW/TOTK to Pokemon S/V.
@@CrizzyEyes Personally I haven't had many performance problems with S/V. The main benefit would be the gameplay features Nintendo could bring. It's been a while since the pokemon formula changed (aside from PLA)
@@BlueOvals24 I found a really old screenshot online showing it being 8.5 GB. Check the wiki how on downloading it on xbox 360. I might still be wrong but I just remember being flabbergasted in 5th grade that a game could be 7 whole gigabits
You also fail to acknowledge how many people would bitch and whine about modern games not progressing because they're all being designed to run on outdated hardware. One of the biggest criticisms of Xbox releases is how they don't look as good or run at a frame rate comparable to PS releases. The point of hardware getting better is for studios to push limits. If they're perpetually making games that run on 15 year old hardware, that's never going to happen.
Triple A games are majority bought by console players, thats why game companies could give a fck about pc owners unless they have they the top tier pc to fully appreciate the true level thier game should be played at. But how many gamers have a pc thats worth the same as a small car compared to people who have xbox or console? 🙃
@@Zack-vi7is min req being 3080 is not "old". At this point all games in my opinion should run well on low settings with higher 10series and above at the very least.
Thank you Charlie!! I’ve been so frustrated that everything is 80$ and needs a $1100 PC to run on when I don’t have the money for that. I want to be able to support game companies but I feel like I’m being locked out
$1100 pc won't run these games. That is just the cheap gamestop gaming cpus basically. You need way more add ons that'll add up to the cost of a new car
@@RavenMenel Definitely more than 1100, probably around 3-4 thousand. But since the average price of a new vehicle actually went down, which does not happen often, it's still above 48 grand. Lmao. Unless you're looking to start a mining operation in which case don't forget the A/C.
I always think that limited disc space and hardware is what made old games so great. Developers were forced to cut anything unnecessary in order to fit it on a disc and make it run well. You're left with nothing but the best bits (in theory). Of course this also hindered developers a lot, I won't deny that. I just feel like some extra effort went in to older games. Or maybe I'm just overly nostalgic about old games and fail to see how abysmal they actually are.
you're right in both cases I'd say but i think the biggest problem is the company itself and not necessarily the developers (generally speaking of course), people really want to create good games and put their love into what they're creating but the big companies most often cut their wings which is why nowadays youre better off searching indie developers and companies to support because you'll get an actual game that is complete and not completely broken upon release. at least with pc you do have that sort of freedom
Most old games were abysmal. Some were exceptional and that's what we remember. We all had great times on older games. But many aged poorly and many more were never actually good, just seemed better to our younger brains. Games are better now on average but a combination of burn out, many gamers being older (so enjoy gaming less than when they were a kid), and to some extent a lot of devs being more willing to copy other games (leading to less variety in some respects) has made this era seem worse.
@@moon16879 totally agree with you. Deadlines, costs and similar things are probably a bigger factor when it comes to quality these days. Somehow I didn't consider that!
this is true with most things, people assume haveing more tools to work with makes the product better, and it does in some cases but in most less is more, it requires you to be creative and think outside the box to work with what youve got, and i think its why alot of games suck now days, they focus on making the biggest and best games and not on the actual premise and concept of the game and making it great. its just lets make it big and beautiful and i think people are sick of that bs, i enjoy older uglier games much more than newer ones, id play a morrowind over a skyrim anyday of the week.
@Aled Davies i think a recent good example is the situation with overwatch 2 not even mentioning all the other aspects but it must be heartbreaking for the people who were working on story mode to know their work will never be seen
DLSS is basically the ,,we don't need to work more on it because it's there" feature. Devs prefer to leave a game super blurry instead of actually optimising it.
Considering the original pokemon wouldn't have run on anything lower than a SNES if devs then optimized their games like the devs do today, It's absolutely disgusting.
@@WEBB99 DLSS 3.0 is definitely not an optimization, its a hack job and marketing gimmick. There is nothing optimal about generating low quality or incomplete frames just to make the FPS number go up.
Every company acts like you sit on the floor staring at a wall all day and that signing up with them, using their stuff, visit their website, etc. is all your life will ever need
I remember when Valorant released, a huge selling point Riot kept addressing was that it would be a game accessible to people on all different levels of computer hardware; whether you had a toaster or a super computer. IDK how they're doing on that mission these days, but when it came out it was like 6GB and I could play it on an absolute trash potato that had been struggling to run CS for a while (since Panorama UI)
@@pornhubmante Well, that's the advantage of FPS games with small maps. I've seen battlefield and... the maps are humongous. Absolutely ridiculous. Both have their own appeal though.
Dead Space remake showed me modern triple A games can still be unbelievably fun and not completely tanking your hard drive. I had to do a double take when I saw it was only 35gb worth of storage.
Tbh it also looks like a game that runs on six yo cpu. Worst thing imo is object pop in in like 100m in front of you. And for open world thats kinda bad.
@@SSTE-md8vx Yeah but the point is it's a modern, massive open world game that pushes design boundaries all over the place. The fact that it runs *at all* on the Switch points to how well devs can optimize when they give half a crap. Compare to Redfall, which is bland, uninspired, and nowhere near the size of TotK, running at 30fps on top of the line computers.
@@MamaSymphonia True. Its a dichotomy. Totk has actually gameplay and ideas but looks like 2000s game. Modern AAA titles push graphics to sell to general public (its always been the case for some reason) and literally are rather movies than games with generic 3 person view game mechanics. STEALTH IN GRASS YAHOOOOO
botw and totk have some weird shit to lower file size, but they're still the largest games compared to other games on switch. at least switch games can run off of a cartridge though. i thought about it as a solution for PC games, but you would need expensive fast storage tech with high capacity to be able to have good load times.
One problem is the demand for higher resolution has outpaced the ability to integrate modern compression methods. For example, webp has been adopted as the current standard compression format for web images tho most computers do not natively support it in their image softwares, even though it is better than jpeg in many ways.
I bought a decent PC probably 12 years ago and it can play any game I want just fine, even now. You don't have to constantly be worrying about upgrading your PC to play games, and you don't have to be confined to indie and 2D games. I have a second gen Intel i7 and a GTX 780ti and it still works great.
Imo they are the best games rn my favorite are Hollow knight, darkest dungeon and undertale they are lightwright, super cheap on sale and have so much content
It’s also more true with western games. They gotta pump out those games quick with no time to compress AND the fact most western games try to go for the “realistic” art style and don’t have a unique art style for themselves Also this is why I’m mainly a console gamer, with the exception of online games. I just plop a disc or cartridge in, install the game (and most of the time updates too I hate that this is normal as well day 1 patches are stupid cause what if the servers go offline?) and then just play the game.
The peak optimization for a game I noticed was Doom Eternal. The graphics look really good even on low settings because they compressed their assets so well (I'm assuming). Even if we don't talk about the gameplay, the smoothness I feel like is indicative of developers who care about delivering a good and acessible product for the players. Most the streamer's who I've seen play the game say the same thing about the smoothness of the game.
Its kinda funny that doom eternal, a vulkan game clearly made with love by ppl who know how to utilize low level graphics apis, kinda started the vulkan/dx12 era that honestly probably led to a lot of these issues.
Isn't the file size huge tho? I haven't checked DOOM Eternal, but I know DOOM 2016 is 80GB. Which is massive for a game with only like 25 hours of content at most.
@@Zack-vi7is I knew 2016's file size was unessesarily huge (I think even bigger than Eternal) but after checking, Eternal's file size actually still is high at 80GB recommended according to Steam, that might be an L there. The game is optimized graphics-wise, but it seems not disk space-wise.
@@Zack-vi7is Doom Eternal was 37GB at launch. They listened to the filesize criticisms that 2016 got and decided to do things like scrap the megatexture gimmick.
One big problem is that hardware got so much more expensive as well. There were plenty of games back in the day that were basically paywalled unless you wanted sub 30 fps at lowest settings but the hardware, especially the graphics cards, were so much more affordable.
1:40 Charlie letting his brotherhood seep through. That's the whole point of socialism, everyone should be able to experience everything, no conditions.
I went to install Far Cry 6 after it came to steam, and instantly held off. I waited so long and was so excited to play it but immediately recoiled and even a month later still haven't installed it because its over 170GB
@@Xvladin For an HDD? Yeah I have one as well, I got it for $100 and use it for my long time storage. You can't use HDD for games anymore. You need a SSD, which an 8TB from Samsung that's internal will cost you $429 on B&H. That's not even counting NVMe's which is slowing replacing SSD. Imagine trying to do that long term for a simple $60 game. Shit's getting expensive.
@NrettG I don't think there's really any noticeable difference between NVME or sata SSDs, so no one ever really needs to buy an NVME if they're more money. I didn't realize they made 8tb SSDs but $430 for that sounds like a good price. That's a TON of SSD space. More than most people could even reasonably use. $430 to have enough hard drive space to last you a decade sounds very fair imo. It's not like you'd be storing files like music, videos, pictures, or documents on it too, so that 8tb is just for installed programs and Windows. That's crazy overkill, especially so for a more average computer user. People could even spend $250 and get a 4tb Samsung Evo 870 and that would still be overkill. Even if every game you own is 100gb, that's 40 games. Even if it's 30 games plus Windows on that SSD, it's still overkill at a very reasonable price. That's why I don't see the problem. Just buy a cheap modern hard drive and you'll be set for a long time. If you're going at it like it's still 2013 and buying multiple 1tb or 2tb hard drives, you're being silly.
It's funny I said a few years ago that I was already ready for a teraflop drive and someone thought I was a psycho but Charlie saw what I've been seeing.
preach dude preach, my 1660 super can run a lot of stuff but i can barely run most modern stuff, ive never had to check specs before this year its becoming a joke.
Because all of IT company is greedy? We don't even need 100+ terabyte of ram or 64+ gb of ram if all IT Company is not greedy. This situation is like you buy groceries and the market not packaging the vegetable well enough and they blame you for not having big grocery bag enough.
this is why i play indie games or just old games the triple A industry is usually one of three things either horrible with fans but have good requirements, bloated beyond belief Or can play on anything but they are extremely greedy(ea as an example i miss ps2 era ea)
I genuinely think something like this is the direct result of crunch culture. Game development companies get so obsessed with pushing a game out as quickly as possible to cut on development costs that they frequently cut corners on things, such as optimization. That, combined with the advent of day one patches (and other future updates thanks to the internet) and those weirdos online that always defend whatever brand they like, it really seems like game companies just think it's appropriate to release games in blatantly unfinished states.
I pretty much fell off the face of the earth in terms of new AAA titles because I can only afford so large of an SSD. May as well use the little data storage I have on a handful of games I know I’ll play consistently.
I don't actually mind games getting larger in terms of disk size even though I know it can be a problem for some. Storage is one area that has continued to see significant progress and cost reduction over time so it's gotten cheaper and cheaper to buy storage at a rate I feel exceeds the inflation of game sizes. With the technology already in use it's my understanding that there are also benefits to leaving things uncompressed as it helps with load times and pulling things from disk, which leads to overall better performance in many cases. There are, however, new technologies being supported now which should significantly increase load times and decrease latency from storage including with compressed files, so this is perhaps an issue that's solvable. What *does* get me, however, is the general increase in acceptance and prevalence of unoptimised games. We are getting proportionately far less from our hardware than ever before, and while it's true that a large part of it is due to how diverse the hardware market has become and how many combinations of hardware there are, it's also true that a lot of it is due to tight timelines and a lack of dedicated work to optimise things. Perhaps the last 'great' example of AAA class optimisation that was not an esports title was GTA V, and not on PC but on PS3. Given the hardware the game looks *stunning* on PS3 and the fact that it runs at all on that hardware is a small miracle and required some truly impressive optimisation. Clearly it is still possible to do outstanding work with making games run well, it's just that most of the time, particularly for PC, publishers are settling for 'good enough' and are allowing hardware to pick up the slack, because if you just bruteforce everything with a 4090 + 7800 X3D then of course it's going to run well enough, but that doesn't at all mean it scales well down the stack.
I agree, it makes more sense for games like WoW. Which is literally a world and has been expanding for the last 20years. But for games to not be optimized or compressed. Shows ho much their is going to be issues and how fast they release games at unreasonable expectations.
The reason behind the outrageously large sizes of games is primarily due to the utilization of 4K/8K textures, which are significantly larger in size. This issue is expected to worsen with the introduction of photoscans, as seen in games like Unrecord. Although Unrecord might be a short and linear experience, I can almost guarantee that the game will have a massive size because Unreal Engine 5's photoscans are incredibly demanding. While the inclusion of high-quality textures explains the increasing game sizes, there is no excuse for poor optimization. Often, developers rush the release and prioritize console versions, leading to day one patches for PC users. However, these patches are often insufficient.
Maybe they could have textures in 2-4 different resolutions, and there could be an option when you're downloading as to what resolution you want. This way, if you have a super beefy computer and want the super high-end but extremely demanding version, you can have it, but the game is still accessible to a range of systems. They could have a few in a sort of middle ground also. I know there's resolution settings in basically every game as is, but offering a sort of setting before you download can save people the headache of having to download dozens of gigabytes of 4k/8k textures if they know ahead of time that they don't want to run it like that. Idk the logistics of that but off the top of my head it seems like a reasonable solution
@@squigglefifi6125 it does seem like a good solution, but then game companies would have to allocate a team for each resolution. They will never do that, no matter how much it makes the gamers happy :(
The console optimization thing gets a little more complicated though, a lot of times its basically impossible to just patch games for pc or whatever. If you make a games entire architecture around a specific platform it can be very hard (or basically impossible unless you just rewrite it) to port that game to another platform while keeping it preformant.
it does suck alot but i think were approaching a transition phase with hard drive space for pcs, just like back in the day ram was in kbs and the hd space was megabytes, when they started making gigabyte spaced hard drives people thought a10 to 20 to 50 gig hard drive was insanely huge and unnecesary. they were super exspensive and slowly things increased in file size and it became more neccesary. back then a 1 gig game was considered massive, i think its just a natural thing for things to get larger as we progress in tech. the terabyte is becoming the new gigabyte where we used to view a 1 terabyte drive as huge soon it will be normal to see 50 to 100 terabyte drives in pcs i think. so yeah it deff sucks rn cause these larger terabyte drives are insanely exspensive just like with everything over time as larger harddrives are needed theyll get cheaper and cheaper and in 10 years a 1 terabyte drive will seem super small in size and well be using 1 petabyte drives and the norm for ram will be several hundred gig sticks. Just my take, but regardless charlies right with them not optimizing and compressing games as much as they could cause its a problem they dont wanna do the work for if they dont have to, its a let the consumer figure it out mindset that alot of companys have, and we just buy these shitty games and dont ask questions while they rake in the money why would they care about customer convienience and support if we still buy there garbage year after year and dont put our foots down. anyways sorry about the rant
it being a transition period is an interesting point, however the issue is uncompressed video and audio files. IE the thing actual players don't care about, even in marketing speak they don't care about pure uncompressed audio especially.
Damn that’s actually tragic. I was hesitant to get a PC cuz I didn’t wanna be constantly swapping out parts every couple years to keep up, but now that I know the games are just gunna run like shit regardless I’m better off just spending money on something else.
I've been raised on a US Territory island in the Pacific called Saipan and due to the sheer distance from servers, our download speeds arent spectacular. Now-a-days we'd have to leave the console/PC on overnight just to get one game down. I've been on deployments too in the middle of no where and have to do the same thing. It's a big pain in the ass that we've been tolerating for some reason.
While I know its no graphical masterpiece, I'm still going to applaud games like TOTK that have as much as it does and keeps the game to under 20gb. Always get worried when new AAA games like GOW:R are bigger than around 90gb. * cough * COD * cough *
THANK YOU for talking about this. I don't understand how they're getting this big and expensive to play. My pc runs Witcher 3 and GTA 5 and Sifu that's where it ends. I don't understand why they stopped optimizing games because more optimization means more customers.
I wish more well known personalities like yourself would speak out about this. Too many out there seem to be in bed with the big companies and promoting the garbage we are seeing.
I 100% AGREE TO THIS!! Game devs definitely should optimize their games so that everyone can play and enjoy them, I truly hope they start taking that into consideration, Omega Strikers is a pretty good example for an optimized game (For example, it's shadows are a part of the game characters themselves and not a separate thing, that's why it doesn't lag at all and can run on many devices!)
I think that this is just one of the main aspects of decreasing quality of new games. Being a PC Gamer is such a headache nowadays just because the way every month you gotta worry about your new setup since there is a good chance that it might be too outdated for the game you’ve been waiting for.
As a low-mid spec gamer I feel it’s rare when I have to actually upgrade something on my pc. The constant worry is in these 1 off games that require a lot and often I don’t enjoy single player games anyways outside of a few. Games like Call of Duty however are starting to get ridiculous as I can’t get over 90 fps when playing specific maps. It’s a lack of optimization from the devs end as most maps run amazingly, but it’s just completely random if I’m getting 120 fps or locked down to 45 for a match.
I just bought a series X and it is crazy that you can install 10-20 360 games for every modern game. Although I was pretty surprised that Splinter Cell Blacklist was 30 gigs even back then.
the RTX 3080 isn't the "minimum" requirement, it's the "recommended", which is usually what they use for high/max settings at higher resolutions the minimum that was listed was a 10 year old i7-4770, and a gtx 1060 which is less than $100 on ebay
I noticed this as well. I think his take on this topic in the first place is uneducated and bad. But anyways, this part of the video in particular is misleading
@@NerdWord still way to fuckin much for a game that looks like it could be ran on an Xbox 360 and runs on the switch let's be real. Also the size of games being genuinely stupid now is valid. No modern game needs to be 100gb if it's optimized properly. Ever
@@NerdWord Never claimed I did. Anyways, whilst you were busy sucking the toes of lazy and inept game developers you still didn't actually explain how they're not massively unoptimized and need to actually take up 100gb of space in that pretentious preamble. All you did was explain how breath of the wild ran well at 720p whilst ignoring the fact it's 16gb and about 4 times bigger and way more in depth than most modern games and is running on essentially a mobile phone. So can you actually do something useful and explain why 100gb is reasonable for modern games?
I don’t consider myself to be a genius in coding or anything. But I’ve had multiple coding professors come up to me and request I optimize the code that they are teaching so that it will be optimized and often times more than not their code will be super inefficient. It’s absolutely crazy to me that as an undergrad student I am being requested by teachers to optimize their code. But the major puts so much stock into calculus and physics that I would have to get my PhD in order to get any degree related to coding. The current education system for coding and video game coding is so ass backwards it’s insane. And despite being this good at coding and getting my degree in cyber security which mind you doesn’t require calculus or physics but you an still get coding jobs with this degree. 99% of the opportunities to get a coding job required 5 years of experience that one percent requires an private/ personal connection to get the job. So no one is offering that experience but they are all expecting it. It’s absolutely insane that gaming companies have multiple younger people just joining the job force that have the ability to fix a lot of the problems they are facing but they are pushing away those younger people. It’s so ass backwards!
Damn that's the size of breath of the wild. Nintendo is a horrible terrible evil company but they sure know how to make their games fit on outdated and weak hardware
@@Xvladin Not usually, but they don't even try to compress them or optimize the game's files when they can, leaving that job to pirates online who do that without compromising anything
@woof demon I guess in an ideal world games would be as small as possible, but I just don't think it's so agregious that it's worth spending time on saving the user 20gb of file space instead of working on the game.
Seems like the extra hardware is needed to pick up the slack the devs left behind 💀 I'm sticking to my 5700 XT till it burns out. Modern gaming cannot justify upgrading at the moment.
Still on a 4790K & GTX1080 combo, and drive storage is the only crutch over time. Fortunately, not upgrading for a LONG time has helped to be able to afford more drive storage. It is pain to have to migrate, though.
I theorize that besides PC being an after thought for several companies there is also a view that PC is a enthusiast's platform. With smartphones having many of the same functions as PCs, specially for more casual users, it's likely that there are less PCs by household than in the past and the industry has an idea that if your game is not meant for enthusiasts it is betten either on a console or on mobile. It also helps that the mobile audience is way more tolerant to predatory monetization. And btw, as an unemployed person in the third world that plays exclusively on PC this ends up resulting in me not playing AAA releases at all.
What’s really nuts is that the Unreal Engine 5 editor package is only 60GB, and that includes a LOT that doesn’t go into a game, just for building games. The fact that the actual games are multiple times larger than the dev suite is nuts
Exactly I am so glad you made this I saw people defending Mortal Kombat’s new 100 GB. They are not actually optimizing these games they have loose files everywhere and are unwilling to compact and organize shit. It seems like they’re just gonna say use the high-end shit to make it look cooler when they’ve just have a loose files everywhere and bugs, hoping high end stuff will carry it and fix it. There’s no reason a fighting game should be 100 GB cyberpunk even broken had more going on in it and it was 70gb. This one is a curse all of us have to deal with not just PC. If a Mortal Kombat game is 100 gb when I hit someone I better be able to clearly see the most detailed tooth fly out of their mouth and have a humongous roster.
I have thought that if companies present at least 2 install sizes, this would subvert a lot of the problem. Install A: Max uncompressed, hyper-textures, super-gigantic 150 gb install. Install B: 20 gb (or even a lot less), sound and graphics compression/reduction that's pretty much indistinguishable from max install. I've played games that look and sound perfectly fine with tiny installs.
As a person studying to be a game dev and a working game tester, i find all this new trend really stupid. It saddened me to see it, i always loved gaming and how it can just make you forget for a bit and relax. At time point i have given up on big gaming companies and just play indie titles.
I have pretty much been stuck in the 80s and 90s with video games for the most part; I am still playing SNES and Genesis games most of the time, and a little bit of N64 every now and then. Those games are very straight to the point, like "alright, let's go!", and you start playing _immediately,_ without a million forced cutscenes and crap like that.
I was already annoyed about the space requirements - But the other requirements ARE going nuts now that you mention it. If it's a new game, I've been playing more AA/indie titles lately. Some of them are still well made. But even there, not all of them.
I completely agree. I am someone who would considered poor. My best device i have is my latest vivo phone during that time. I have always, like actually my dream, to play a new released game. Like one of the earliest people to play the new game, and i mean like a pretty high-spec game that is. This might be cringe for some, but i must say it is one of the reason why genshin is so popular now. It makes people like me actually able to play for the first time, a new game that just been released. Of course their popularity has a lot of other factors such as the time it was released (covid/quarantine), it was very accessible to everybody, it has a lot of platforms available, etc. You have no idea how excited and in awe i was when i play it for the first time.
i’m not a game dev but i am a 3d animator and i’m certain this is happening cause they just use random 90g assets from unity or something without putting in an inkling of effort to compress or change them. so they end up with like a 400g lamp in the background
Info dump that answers the questions in this video. For the first part, The reason why games take up so much more space is because of 4k monitors. you need 4k textures in order to look good on a 4k monitor if your trying to have "realistic" graphics. When you jump in texture size, like 2k to 4k, the data cost is squared, not doubled, SQUARED. Games in 2015ish were using 2k textures, so there were like 20gb. a 20 gb game with 4k textures is now 4x the cost, 80gbs. Games that were 25gbs will now take 100gb of space, because the cost is squared. Also because its using an exponential cost, a little bit goes a long way in terms of storage size when the devs are adding stuff to the game. So why do games HAVE to be in 4k? because many AAA game studios get money from monitor manufactures to make them that way. So the Monitor companies can talk about how great this game will look on their 4k monitors. Same thing with graphics card companies or computer manufacturers like alienware. Compression has artifacts, which can lower quality, unacceptable if you have a big contract with a monitor or graphics card company. Japanese companies generally dont have these contracts. Graphics card companies are American, French or German. Thats why alot of Japanese games dont have this problem, they dont have those contracts! When those contracts end, devs can then compress graphics, which is why sometimes they're updates that later lower the disk space. But many of the good compression software is 3rd party owned, which means devs have to pay to use that stuff and that increases dev cost. It also costs money to update a game, especially on PS or XBOX, you have to pay them to update, bigger patch, higher cost. So some devs just dont bother to update after contracts end cause a texture patch will be big size and therefore expensive, and i mean consumers already bought it so not like that money spent is gonna get new customers. Big execs will never sign off on that cost increase. Also many devs now just view 4k as standard as they themselves all usually have 4k (or bigger) monitors. Theres alot of moving parts to this... Audio can also eat up a TON of space, and many games have more expanded audio tracks so they can sell them to make some more money. For the second part, Computer minimum requirements: There is a ton of new software that has completely changed the way games are being developed, but this new tech requires modern graphics cards. There is a complex relationship between videogame developers and graphics card companies. This new tech does not work with old graphics cards. Game devs are in a weird place where they have to choose between this new tech and the new work flows (which are easier and much faster!) but limited to newer graphics cards; Nvidia RTX 1080 or newer or equivalent. Or to use the old ways, which is a more difficult workflow and longer dev time with a potentially worse looking end product. There are also often contracts made with computer part companies to consider. Some game devs are just so happy to do these new things that they dont care about selling to old graphics card, they want to play with their new shiny toys! ive actually struggled with this myself working with prototypes, the new tech is so cool and easy to use and so tempting to use >.> game devs will understand, but i can see why consumers dont. Not AI though, devs must avoid A.I like the plague or the lawyers will yell at you because of legal stuff happening everywhere. You cant copyright or own anything produced by A.I, thats bad for companies selling a product since they kinda need to own it in order to sell it. if you were still reading this post and wondering about how A.I impacts game dev, there ya go. They're have been several breakthroughs in technology that has put game developement in an awkward position, it will probably be another 2 years before things start to smooth out. till then just always make sure to adjust the graphics setting to you PC's abilities.
The high requirements and large size is from the marketing department: the reasoning is "If we display the most high end stats, we can demand a higher price and that's what the modern consumer expects." "If the file size is huge, we can charge more for it." It sadly is as simple as that.
I can see this becoming more and more of a Key Selling Point for cloud gaming services like GeForce, as games get bigger and higher specced. Unfortunately, will that wind up being the same "expensive rabbit hole" as "In order to watch all my favourite shows I need Netflix and Paramount and Amazon and..." 😕
The whole AAA industry needs an overhaul. Once games stop getting sharted out at lightspeed with unreachable deadlines, developers can start focusing on stuff like optimization and reducing disk space. As it is right now, they're struggling to even make playable games by release.
What I'm tired of with the Gaming Industry honestly myself, is the complete lack of local couch co-op support in today's modern video games. I literally had to build my spouse their own gaming PC, family-share my Steam library, then purchase additional keys for these modern co-op games that absolutely refused to allow for local co-op of the same magnitude found in 'It Takes Two'. Yes, I completely get and understand why they do this. To sell more copies of the same game, but that doesn't, you know, make it any less of a really shitty practice.
Some studios have always been lazy in the optimization department. I learnt this the hard way over 13 years ago when COD4 and MW2 ran good on my toaster PC, but WaW and Black Ops were dogwater on PC, looking and running awful at the same time, deapite being in the exact same engine as the other 2 entries that ran perfectly fine. Let us just say that Treyarch was never the spearhead in the technology department of COD games, and their very first games shwoed that big time. Deapite the giant budgets, they never knew what the word optimization meant.
I remember looking at PS3’s online not long after they announced the PS3 Slim (2009) & I immediately ruled out the 250GB PS3 Slim bc I thought the 120GB PS3 Slim was adequate for the amount of games I would actually play. Then I thought “well, even 120GB is more than I need. Maybe I’ll just stick with the 80GB standard PS3.” Now it’s around 135GB just to have Fortnite, Rocket League, & Apex Legends stored on my console to casually play when I have down time. I would be in trouble if I played more than just an hour or two at night after my son goes to bed. Even then, I have an XSX that has about 800GB of usable space & with casual games & a few single player games, my hard drive is almost 90% full.
With storage sizes you gotta remember consoles like the series s only come with 500gb and it costs well over $100 to get a 1tb SSD hard drive (ssd is required for next gen games) and that’s with a price drop
Literally the only thing separating a large chunk of the audience from being able to play good games, is the paywall that is hardware and software requirements. As someone who had to visit the school's computer lab more than anyone else because I couldn't afford a decent one at home, I feel the pain of the masses.
the GB thing is mostly textures, so a single 4k or 8k texture could be 1 GB easily, uncompressed. and as a solo dev, i can say that the optimization process is a real pain in the ass. even for experts in an AAA studio it would take months to fully optimize each scene/location, and that's only for one rig, not to mention consoles. also it doesn't make sense to optimize games for toasters since that's a tiny market share and programmers are expensive as fuck. since learning this, i'm surprised games like Cyberpunk even launch, and realized i was a spoiled gamer. but that doesn't mean we should bend over, of course.
I'm a huge fan of Elder Scrolls and been playing Skyrim all my life. And I'm facing the reality that I probably won't be able to run TES6 even on the most shit graphics I could use, since I will definitely not have the money for a new gen gaming pc. The lack of care for non-wealthy gamers by big companies is so sad and frustrating. It might be silly, but I would genuinely be heartbroken and devastated if I won't be able to run TES6, cuz I've been waiting my whole life for it. Ugh, I feel the frustration, Charlz, same here.
For me, PC gaming has always been about catching up with vintage titles that i didnt get to play when i was a kid. Keeping up with modern specs to play modern games is just waaaay too expensive. It's easier to just have a console (especially a portable one like the switch).
I have to say this is probably intentional, people that crack games usually don't have good computers. The result is not that more people are playing AAA games, now more than never, people are playing alternative indie games. A big part of the enjoyment in video games is sharing your experience. I hate League and I hate Riot even more, but the idea of a free game with "customizations" for people that like the game spend is just genius. Also allowing small creators to make a revenue out of internal mechanics, like levels in Mario Maker, and take a fair share would also be a great idea. Companies are failing to understand that a lot individual hobbies have a community spirit.
Optimization requires time and better programmers. Both cost money. The AAA companies choose not to "waste" that money because people buy the products anyway.
As a PC player with a 3050 i agree I payed for a 1000$ Nitro 5 Acer gaming laptop and it can barely run roblox without constantly crashing in perspective. Specs mean nothing too.
Sucks for console players too because now you can only have about 2-3 games installed at once if you're lucky. If you want to go back to another game, you have to delete one of your current ones and redownload the previous title. And it's for the most unnecessary and basic games as well. I could be playing a dozen or more AAA games released from 2014-2017 with the same space I now use for 1-2 games released in 2019-2023 on the same original, outdated console.
I play games on a normal work/school laptop, decently priced a few years ago when I bought it, but still it didn't come with a good graphics card as it wasn't intended for gaming initially. I know that's my own doing, but it is a shame when the first thing I check about a game recommended by a friend is the minimum requirements to run, rather than watching a trailer or even the price
My biggest irritation is with the TPM shit, I upgraded to Windows 11 on an unsupported device (mind you it is only 2 years old and so is the hardware) It is unsupported because it had no TPM 2.0 . My fault ig for not checking that first. But now I can't play valorant and people are saying this should be the standard, now I'm just scared for what's coming ahead. There has to be a better anti-cheat solution than just banning hardware. Anyways that was my rant 🤓☝️
Yeah I easily hate the TPM 2.0 requirements. Why should I give game companies root access to my computer just to play a fps? Made it much easier to avoid riot games and others that support it. There are much better methods and tpm is just downright lazy.
As a broke college student who is currently budgeting every single day to build a mid range pc, this video is extremely comforting. I wish more youtubers and streamers talked about this instead of bragging about their specs when everyone else is suffering.
Idk what your budget is but Linus Tech Tips recently posted a video on making a $500 pc
Videogames were always for rich kids
@@tylercafe1260 not if you sail the seas, that's what I did as a second/third world kid with a shitty laptop from school 10 years ago
@vlonuh 3rd world countries really struggle, especially nowadays... no wonder mobile games' get more popular than Pc/Console games.
@@KagatoAsuka I appreciate the suggestion! Unfortunately a lot of those videos hide a lot of hidden costs and gray market purchases. Plus those videos contain specs that experience the same issues that Charlie is talking about in this video.
I live in an underdeveloped country at an age where I can't legally get a job yet, and my wallet isn't worth 1 tiddlywink from what I've seen in it. There's literally no chance of me being able to even afford a decent pc, let alone whatever kind of fucking space engine game devs nowadays are expecting from modern gamers. It's so nice to see someone talk about this issue, especially when their pc is already pretty good. Thank you Charlie.
i live in a village in Indonesia, do some online stuff to save up money and get a budget computer so i can finally play a game that i want to play, after saving enough money and build the PC i can't even download most of the game that i want because of the ridiculous big size, my internet gonna take like few days to download 1 game, it's insane.
Hell, my new PC I'm waiting to have built has a 4TB and 2TB just so I can split my main stay games up and still have space. It's insane the amount of space they need anymore. Ark is literally the only game I can even give a pass to cuz of the sheer volume of content.
@@ki6108 I would love to visit Europe someday to see Indonesia. 101%. Although I can't speak Tagalog just yet.
@@ultimaxkom8728 Indonesia is in southeast Asia... you American? 😂
@@mollusckscramp4124 It's good that you laughed at my s upid joke.
The insane inflation of game file sizes infuriates me so much. The best looking games from ten years ago are still so relatively close to what games look like today and yet they demand literally tenfold the file space. I'm always struggling with making space to have even a few modern games installed, while I have folders full of older titles that amount to not even a single modern title.
Like what exactly? I genuinely can't think of a game that came out ten years ago that looks as good as something like Horizon Forbidden West. GTA 5 was like top of the line at that point in time and now it looks like shit compared to modern games. Really not sure what ten year old games you're referring to that look anywhere near as good as the games that are coming out now.
@@Zack-vi7is I mean sure, GTA 5 doesn't match up to Forbbien West, but its graphic are still solid. That, Skyrim, Portal 2, the original Stanley Parable, all of those have graphics that might not be all the way up to grade of modern games, but they don't look bad, far from it.
@@druidknight1513 there's still a very obvious and significant difference tho. No one said they look bad outright, but compared to the limits modern games are pushing, they're clearly substantially worse.
@@Zack-vi7is no.
new bad old good
@@Zack-vi7is gears of war 2 on the xbox 360 looked so fucking good on my friends 800$ 4k 25 inch tv I thought it was a new game when I first popped it in. Halo 3 and mario galaxy from 2007 still look pretty incredible today. Halo reach is another good example. They arent texture to texture good, but the lighting/atsmophere of the game is legit the same. A game from 2010 was like 5 gigs that in todays time is 100g. Stupid as fuck. Especially since 90% of games now arent even half as good as games from 10 years ago.
As a person living in a lower income country, a 3090 graphics card alone costs around 8-10x the average monthly salary. If you're working for minimum wage, that's around 14 months of work without spending a penny.
People simply never buy games because no one can afford them. These requirements are so out of control and you can't enjoy anything new.
I can only play games from 2000-2012 because I can't afford anything to run modern games. I thought it might be possible if I save money but it's getting so out of touch. It's so so frustrating.
It has definitely become a hobby that is for those who have an expendable income. Those who don't have to worry or think about everything they need to live their everyday life. This means gaming is no longer a hobby it's a luxury.
kevin?
@@Fredroc57 remember when gaming was the escape from the soul crushing days you face working at a dead end job you make barely enough to keep your head above water? now theyve even taken that from us aswell. Dude everything has gotten to exspensive, even freaking food, is food gonna be a luxury soon too? or just food that tastes good? i guess we will start eating canned food like we feed our animals and theyll reserve the good HEALTHY food for the people who have money, cause they deserve it right? there the smart ones who either had someone pay them through college to be able to have a high paying salary or were smart enough to figure out ways to exploit the rest of us. those are the ones who deserve to not eat chunked meat and ground corn cold out of cans and be leashed around like a metaphorical dog by your asshole of a boss who thinks because hes in that position he can talk to you like youre fudgeing stupid when in reality hes only the boss cause his dad owns a dealership ,yeah thats the guy who deserves the fresh sandwhiches from trader joes and the ps5 not the guys who are making him all his and the companies money with the hard work and passion/dedication it takes to provide the service they sale. while he sits in his office drinking bang energy drinks and playing fudgeing clash of clans on his phone 1300 dollar phone for 6 hours and gets up and walks around the guys working to make sure there staying on task for 15 minutes, then heads outside to smoke a cigar for 45 minutes. then back in to the office to do god knows what with the shades closed for another 3 hours, then gets to go home and play hogwarts legacy and nba 2k23 or 24 or whatever fudgeing year there on at this point on his ps5 when the rest of us cant afford 800 dollar consoles sold by the cornhole resellers on ebay, so were forced to wait until there actually available, 3 years later, so god knows when if ever i can play hogwarts legacy. im really depressed.
I live in the US and that stuff is too expensive, I basically stick with 90's games up to the early 2010's. I don't have any more than like 1 game that's from this decade :/
Yeah... Buying games... I really do that... You know giving my money to a super rich company in a super rich countries where people waste an entire day's worth of food because they already ate themselves into a coma... Where people drink more soda than most other humans can drink water...
Bruh, giving money to these people is stupid unless you are one of them. What if they go out of business because people over here pirate it? Who care! There is more where they came from. Also going to be another American or Japanese group looking to cash in on video games.
Until I can afford a Lambo I am not giving my money to none of these companies. Not like they can arrest me for going blackbeard on them.
so when I was studying many years ago, my lecturer made us code Java on the worst rigs available... not because he wanted us to suffer, but because he wanted us to use every resource available to us.... it was a great learning experience.
This sounds amazing and you kind of turned my bad experience into a good one with a frame of mind shift. I hated my assembly class. Because first assembly. Second the machines were terrible. But it got to a point you would develop a know of what registers developed what failures when and thinking back. I knew that code backwards and forwards.
Crazy triple A studios get paid that much and don't even think twice about their garbage churned out production.
Imagine having the tiniest Pp like you and him!?!?!
Wasn’t Rollercoaster Tycoon originally built in assembly by one dude (or a small team). That’s why it ran so well for what it was and the resources it had available.
That's the way to do it. To refer to the point made in the video, if Golem has been fitted on to a Nintendo, that should serve as 'the worst rig' and 'ported' to the PC with very low minimum specs. Then they can optimise up, rather than down.
In fact, if all games had been doing this, making a 'nintendo/worst rig' version, they would make a lot more sales, so it makes business sense
I reckon they just want to slap the largest numbers on the min. requirements as some sort of shareholder appeasement thing, so they can claim they're making cutting edge games that justify investment.
I learned to play guitar on a very, very poor quality guitar. The day I got a decent strat, I was blown away by how good I'd become. Same logic here.
@@phillipjones5794correct, one individual. There's a great documentary made by someone on UA-cam about it that I watched a week or two ago. It's insane what that dev was able to accomplish.
This is a place where Nintendo really shines. They optimize the hell out of everything and you can fit multiple of their AAA games on the default Switch storage
This is why I wish Nintendo could bring Pokemon development in-house. But Game Freak owns partial ownership of the IP and they refuse to let it go, like a rotting corpse in rigor mortis. It shows when you compare the performance of BOTW/TOTK to Pokemon S/V.
@@CrizzyEyes Personally I haven't had many performance problems with S/V. The main benefit would be the gameplay features Nintendo could bring. It's been a while since the pokemon formula changed (aside from PLA)
I remember GTA V being 7GB on Xbox 360 and was completely blown away. I had to get an external hard drive to even download it in the first place
how tf is it over 100gb today. Give me that 7gb back please, I don't care about online I just want to play the game.
@@NrettG Bring me back to the days when I could just put a game in a console and… it ran. Didn’t need to download NASA sized files at all
Wtf, GTA V was never 7gb. Pretty sure it started at like 30 on 360 and ps3.
@@BlueOvals24 yea no way gta 5 was only 7gb
@@BlueOvals24 I found a really old screenshot online showing it being 8.5 GB. Check the wiki how on downloading it on xbox 360. I might still be wrong but I just remember being flabbergasted in 5th grade that a game could be 7 whole gigabits
They completely fail to acknowledge just how many people would be buying AAA games if they were runnable on old computers.
You also fail to acknowledge how many people would bitch and whine about modern games not progressing because they're all being designed to run on outdated hardware. One of the biggest criticisms of Xbox releases is how they don't look as good or run at a frame rate comparable to PS releases.
The point of hardware getting better is for studios to push limits. If they're perpetually making games that run on 15 year old hardware, that's never going to happen.
@@Zack-vi7is except nobodies on 15 year old hardware its like 5 years
Triple A games are majority bought by console players, thats why game companies could give a fck about pc owners unless they have they the top tier pc to fully appreciate the true level thier game should be played at.
But how many gamers have a pc thats worth the same as a small car compared to people who have xbox or console?
🙃
@@skycycle3395 switch is outdated by more than 5 years
@@Zack-vi7is min req being 3080 is not "old". At this point all games in my opinion should run well on low settings with higher 10series and above at the very least.
This deserves to go on the main channel
Nah Charlie trying to hit 1m subs
The comment sections on this channel is actually bearable so I hope he keeps doing content here
And then it did
Ong
Imagine needing a super high spec specialized machine to enjoy the highly refined masterpiece that is Forspoken
Bro 😂 I laughed way harder then I should have... then I remembered I platniumed the game... 😂
Thank you Charlie!! I’ve been so frustrated that everything is 80$ and needs a $1100 PC to run on when I don’t have the money for that. I want to be able to support game companies but I feel like I’m being locked out
$1100 pc won't run these games. That is just the cheap gamestop gaming cpus basically. You need way more add ons that'll add up to the cost of a new car
@@RavenMenel Definitely more than 1100, probably around 3-4 thousand. But since the average price of a new vehicle actually went down, which does not happen often, it's still above 48 grand. Lmao. Unless you're looking to start a mining operation in which case don't forget the A/C.
I always think that limited disc space and hardware is what made old games so great. Developers were forced to cut anything unnecessary in order to fit it on a disc and make it run well. You're left with nothing but the best bits (in theory). Of course this also hindered developers a lot, I won't deny that. I just feel like some extra effort went in to older games. Or maybe I'm just overly nostalgic about old games and fail to see how abysmal they actually are.
you're right in both cases I'd say but i think the biggest problem is the company itself and not necessarily the developers (generally speaking of course), people really want to create good games and put their love into what they're creating but the big companies most often cut their wings
which is why nowadays youre better off searching indie developers and companies to support because you'll get an actual game that is complete and not completely broken upon release. at least with pc you do have that sort of freedom
Most old games were abysmal. Some were exceptional and that's what we remember. We all had great times on older games. But many aged poorly and many more were never actually good, just seemed better to our younger brains.
Games are better now on average but a combination of burn out, many gamers being older (so enjoy gaming less than when they were a kid), and to some extent a lot of devs being more willing to copy other games (leading to less variety in some respects) has made this era seem worse.
@@moon16879 totally agree with you. Deadlines, costs and similar things are probably a bigger factor when it comes to quality these days. Somehow I didn't consider that!
this is true with most things, people assume haveing more tools to work with makes the product better, and it does in some cases but in most less is more, it requires you to be creative and think outside the box to work with what youve got, and i think its why alot of games suck now days, they focus on making the biggest and best games and not on the actual premise and concept of the game and making it great. its just lets make it big and beautiful and i think people are sick of that bs, i enjoy older uglier games much more than newer ones, id play a morrowind over a skyrim anyday of the week.
@Aled Davies i think a recent good example is the situation with overwatch 2
not even mentioning all the other aspects but it must be heartbreaking for the people who were working on story mode to know their work will never be seen
DLSS is basically the ,,we don't need to work more on it because it's there" feature.
Devs prefer to leave a game super blurry instead of actually optimising it.
devs discovered that they can save money and time by making you buy a high end gpu
Considering the original pokemon wouldn't have run on anything lower than a SNES if devs then optimized their games like the devs do today, It's absolutely disgusting.
We need the Rollercoaster tycoon dev back.
bad take, DLSS is an optimization, that's literally what its for, alot of work goes into optimising games graphicly
@@WEBB99 DLSS 3.0 is definitely not an optimization, its a hack job and marketing gimmick. There is nothing optimal about generating low quality or incomplete frames just to make the FPS number go up.
Every company acts like you sit on the floor staring at a wall all day and that signing up with them, using their stuff, visit their website, etc. is all your life will ever need
Charles, i have an off topic proposal. Try the curly girl hair routine. I’m seeing a lot of untapped potential with those gorgeous locks of yours
I remember when Valorant released, a huge selling point Riot kept addressing was that it would be a game accessible to people on all different levels of computer hardware; whether you had a toaster or a super computer. IDK how they're doing on that mission these days, but when it came out it was like 6GB and I could play it on an absolute trash potato that had been struggling to run CS for a while (since Panorama UI)
cs still runs on anything basically, cs2 does 90 fps at 1080 on a gt 780 ive never seen a modern game even run on that
@@pornhubmante Well, that's the advantage of FPS games with small maps. I've seen battlefield and... the maps are humongous. Absolutely ridiculous. Both have their own appeal though.
Charlie’s hair just decided to be luxurious today
Greaseball decided to be Fabulousball today
Dead Space remake showed me modern triple A games can still be unbelievably fun and not completely tanking your hard drive.
I had to do a double take when I saw it was only 35gb worth of storage.
Tears of the Kingdom is 16GB and runs on a six year old cell phone processor
Tbh it also looks like a game that runs on six yo cpu. Worst thing imo is object pop in in like 100m in front of you. And for open world thats kinda bad.
@@SSTE-md8vx Yeah but the point is it's a modern, massive open world game that pushes design boundaries all over the place. The fact that it runs *at all* on the Switch points to how well devs can optimize when they give half a crap. Compare to Redfall, which is bland, uninspired, and nowhere near the size of TotK, running at 30fps on top of the line computers.
@@MamaSymphonia True. Its a dichotomy. Totk has actually gameplay and ideas but looks like 2000s game. Modern AAA titles push graphics to sell to general public (its always been the case for some reason) and literally are rather movies than games with generic 3 person view game mechanics. STEALTH IN GRASS YAHOOOOO
You know what is sad? When you can spot that the game will be broken before it even comes out.
What game has released without issues in the last 5 years ?
@@jeremytherocklobsta Elden ring, tears of the kingdom
@@jeremytherocklobsta god of war Ragnarok, pretty much new every resident evil game except for 8 on PC, the Yakuza series, etc.
@@TheBrutalSax so trash games outside of gow and elden ring gotcha 👍🏿
At least you won't waste your money on this game and you know what to expect with future games from this studio.
Honestly crazy that nintendo is so good at compressing games, especially botw and totk
They have to be veterans at compression whenever they're developing games for the specs equivalent of a mobile phone
Yeah meanwhile on my PS5 it is necessary to have a SSD to have a decent library of games
botw and totk have some weird shit to lower file size, but they're still the largest games compared to other games on switch. at least switch games can run off of a cartridge though. i thought about it as a solution for PC games, but you would need expensive fast storage tech with high capacity to be able to have good load times.
why do people think that AAA don't compress anything? do you think its raw assets you're downloading?
@Luke Webb because the vmfile sizes and sprc requirements for a lot of AAA titles these days are not justified by how the games look and run.
One problem is the demand for higher resolution has outpaced the ability to integrate modern compression methods. For example, webp has been adopted as the current standard compression format for web images tho most computers do not natively support it in their image softwares, even though it is better than jpeg in many ways.
This is why I'm stuck just playing 2d games or indie games. At least I'm still having fun and not worrying about buying a better computer.
I bought a decent PC probably 12 years ago and it can play any game I want just fine, even now.
You don't have to constantly be worrying about upgrading your PC to play games, and you don't have to be confined to indie and 2D games.
I have a second gen Intel i7 and a GTX 780ti and it still works great.
Imo they are the best games rn my favorite are Hollow knight, darkest dungeon and undertale they are lightwright, super cheap on sale and have so much content
And i have old base ps4 for all the souls games, sekiro and bb
@tarcreeper _ all games are free is you just torrent them
@@Xvladin i have base morality and 5 bucks for a great game.
Arguably the cutest “See ya” I’ve heard from Charlie and now I’m smiling about it 😅
Just goes to show how insane Deep Rock Galactic is. It’s 3 GB.
I’m constantly uninstalling and reinstalling games every time I want to play something
It’s also more true with western games. They gotta pump out those games quick with no time to compress AND the fact most western games try to go for the “realistic” art style and don’t have a unique art style for themselves
Also this is why I’m mainly a console gamer, with the exception of online games. I just plop a disc or cartridge in, install the game (and most of the time updates too I hate that this is normal as well day 1 patches are stupid cause what if the servers go offline?) and then just play the game.
I never really understood until recently but I’m constantly reminded a lot of us have shared experiences. I thought I was the only ine
The peak optimization for a game I noticed was Doom Eternal. The graphics look really good even on low settings because they compressed their assets so well (I'm assuming). Even if we don't talk about the gameplay, the smoothness I feel like is indicative of developers who care about delivering a good and acessible product for the players. Most the streamer's who I've seen play the game say the same thing about the smoothness of the game.
Its kinda funny that doom eternal, a vulkan game clearly made with love by ppl who know how to utilize low level graphics apis, kinda started the vulkan/dx12 era that honestly probably led to a lot of these issues.
Isn't the file size huge tho? I haven't checked DOOM Eternal, but I know DOOM 2016 is 80GB. Which is massive for a game with only like 25 hours of content at most.
@@Zack-vi7is I knew 2016's file size was unessesarily huge (I think even bigger than Eternal) but after checking, Eternal's file size actually still is high at 80GB recommended according to Steam, that might be an L there. The game is optimized graphics-wise, but it seems not disk space-wise.
@@Zack-vi7is Doom Eternal was 37GB at launch. They listened to the filesize criticisms that 2016 got and decided to do things like scrap the megatexture gimmick.
Mgs5 is a great optimized game as well. Amazing graphics and it runs 60fps on ps4 and Xbox one, and it runs well on my piece of shit
One big problem is that hardware got so much more expensive as well. There were plenty of games back in the day that were basically paywalled unless you wanted sub 30 fps at lowest settings but the hardware, especially the graphics cards, were so much more affordable.
1:40 Charlie letting his brotherhood seep through. That's the whole point of socialism, everyone should be able to experience everything, no conditions.
I went to install Far Cry 6 after it came to steam, and instantly held off. I waited so long and was so excited to play it but immediately recoiled and even a month later still haven't installed it because its over 170GB
You don't have 170GB space? That's not a lot my man. A 10 TERRABYTE hard drive is $170
@@Xvladin For an HDD? Yeah I have one as well, I got it for $100 and use it for my long time storage. You can't use HDD for games anymore. You need a SSD, which an 8TB from Samsung that's internal will cost you $429 on B&H. That's not even counting NVMe's which is slowing replacing SSD. Imagine trying to do that long term for a simple $60 game. Shit's getting expensive.
@zingleton Being in the future is great! Things are always getting bigger and bigger as times go on, but 10TB is still a ton of space.
@NrettG I don't think there's really any noticeable difference between NVME or sata SSDs, so no one ever really needs to buy an NVME if they're more money.
I didn't realize they made 8tb SSDs but $430 for that sounds like a good price. That's a TON of SSD space. More than most people could even reasonably use. $430 to have enough hard drive space to last you a decade sounds very fair imo. It's not like you'd be storing files like music, videos, pictures, or documents on it too, so that 8tb is just for installed programs and Windows. That's crazy overkill, especially so for a more average computer user.
People could even spend $250 and get a 4tb Samsung Evo 870 and that would still be overkill. Even if every game you own is 100gb, that's 40 games. Even if it's 30 games plus Windows on that SSD, it's still overkill at a very reasonable price.
That's why I don't see the problem. Just buy a cheap modern hard drive and you'll be set for a long time.
If you're going at it like it's still 2013 and buying multiple 1tb or 2tb hard drives, you're being silly.
It's funny I said a few years ago that I was already ready for a teraflop drive and someone thought I was a psycho but Charlie saw what I've been seeing.
preach dude preach, my 1660 super can run a lot of stuff but i can barely run most modern stuff, ive never had to check specs before this year its becoming a joke.
Because all of IT company is greedy? We don't even need 100+ terabyte of ram or 64+ gb of ram if all IT Company is not greedy. This situation is like you buy groceries and the market not packaging the vegetable well enough and they blame you for not having big grocery bag enough.
It's like if RuneScape required a 4.5GHz 8-core CPU and 8GB of VRAM.
this is why i play indie games or just old games the triple A industry is usually one of three things either horrible with fans but have good requirements, bloated beyond belief Or can play on anything but they are extremely greedy(ea as an example i miss ps2 era ea)
I genuinely think something like this is the direct result of crunch culture. Game development companies get so obsessed with pushing a game out as quickly as possible to cut on development costs that they frequently cut corners on things, such as optimization. That, combined with the advent of day one patches (and other future updates thanks to the internet) and those weirdos online that always defend whatever brand they like, it really seems like game companies just think it's appropriate to release games in blatantly unfinished states.
I pretty much fell off the face of the earth in terms of new AAA titles because I can only afford so large of an SSD. May as well use the little data storage I have on a handful of games I know I’ll play consistently.
I don't actually mind games getting larger in terms of disk size even though I know it can be a problem for some. Storage is one area that has continued to see significant progress and cost reduction over time so it's gotten cheaper and cheaper to buy storage at a rate I feel exceeds the inflation of game sizes. With the technology already in use it's my understanding that there are also benefits to leaving things uncompressed as it helps with load times and pulling things from disk, which leads to overall better performance in many cases. There are, however, new technologies being supported now which should significantly increase load times and decrease latency from storage including with compressed files, so this is perhaps an issue that's solvable. What *does* get me, however, is the general increase in acceptance and prevalence of unoptimised games. We are getting proportionately far less from our hardware than ever before, and while it's true that a large part of it is due to how diverse the hardware market has become and how many combinations of hardware there are, it's also true that a lot of it is due to tight timelines and a lack of dedicated work to optimise things.
Perhaps the last 'great' example of AAA class optimisation that was not an esports title was GTA V, and not on PC but on PS3. Given the hardware the game looks *stunning* on PS3 and the fact that it runs at all on that hardware is a small miracle and required some truly impressive optimisation. Clearly it is still possible to do outstanding work with making games run well, it's just that most of the time, particularly for PC, publishers are settling for 'good enough' and are allowing hardware to pick up the slack, because if you just bruteforce everything with a 4090 + 7800 X3D then of course it's going to run well enough, but that doesn't at all mean it scales well down the stack.
I agree, it makes more sense for games like WoW. Which is literally a world and has been expanding for the last 20years.
But for games to not be optimized or compressed. Shows ho much their is going to be issues and how fast they release games at unreasonable expectations.
The reason behind the outrageously large sizes of games is primarily due to the utilization of 4K/8K textures, which are significantly larger in size. This issue is expected to worsen with the introduction of photoscans, as seen in games like Unrecord. Although Unrecord might be a short and linear experience, I can almost guarantee that the game will have a massive size because Unreal Engine 5's photoscans are incredibly demanding. While the inclusion of high-quality textures explains the increasing game sizes, there is no excuse for poor optimization. Often, developers rush the release and prioritize console versions, leading to day one patches for PC users. However, these patches are often insufficient.
Maybe they could have textures in 2-4 different resolutions, and there could be an option when you're downloading as to what resolution you want. This way, if you have a super beefy computer and want the super high-end but extremely demanding version, you can have it, but the game is still accessible to a range of systems. They could have a few in a sort of middle ground also. I know there's resolution settings in basically every game as is, but offering a sort of setting before you download can save people the headache of having to download dozens of gigabytes of 4k/8k textures if they know ahead of time that they don't want to run it like that. Idk the logistics of that but off the top of my head it seems like a reasonable solution
@@squigglefifi6125 it does seem like a good solution, but then game companies would have to allocate a team for each resolution. They will never do that, no matter how much it makes the gamers happy :(
The console optimization thing gets a little more complicated though, a lot of times its basically impossible to just patch games for pc or whatever. If you make a games entire architecture around a specific platform it can be very hard (or basically impossible unless you just rewrite it) to port that game to another platform while keeping it preformant.
I literally just spend $400 on a Playstation or Xbox, and I don't have to worry about any of this.😂
it does suck alot but i think were approaching a transition phase with hard drive space for pcs, just like back in the day ram was in kbs and the hd space was megabytes, when they started making gigabyte spaced hard drives people thought a10 to 20 to 50 gig hard drive was insanely huge and unnecesary. they were super exspensive and slowly things increased in file size and it became more neccesary. back then a 1 gig game was considered massive, i think its just a natural thing for things to get larger as we progress in tech. the terabyte is becoming the new gigabyte where we used to view a 1 terabyte drive as huge soon it will be normal to see 50 to 100 terabyte drives in pcs i think. so yeah it deff sucks rn cause these larger terabyte drives are insanely exspensive just like with everything over time as larger harddrives are needed theyll get cheaper and cheaper and in 10 years a 1 terabyte drive will seem super small in size and well be using 1 petabyte drives and the norm for ram will be several hundred gig sticks. Just my take, but regardless charlies right with them not optimizing and compressing games as much as they could cause its a problem they dont wanna do the work for if they dont have to, its a let the consumer figure it out mindset that alot of companys have, and we just buy these shitty games and dont ask questions while they rake in the money why would they care about customer convienience and support if we still buy there garbage year after year and dont put our foots down. anyways sorry about the rant
it being a transition period is an interesting point, however the issue is uncompressed video and audio files. IE the thing actual players don't care about, even in marketing speak they don't care about pure uncompressed audio especially.
Damn that’s actually tragic. I was hesitant to get a PC cuz I didn’t wanna be constantly swapping out parts every couple years to keep up, but now that I know the games are just gunna run like shit regardless I’m better off just spending money on something else.
If we keep Zordon in the minimum requirements he can never die!
I've been raised on a US Territory island in the Pacific called Saipan and due to the sheer distance from servers, our download speeds arent spectacular. Now-a-days we'd have to leave the console/PC on overnight just to get one game down. I've been on deployments too in the middle of no where and have to do the same thing. It's a big pain in the ass that we've been tolerating for some reason.
While I know its no graphical masterpiece, I'm still going to applaud games like TOTK that have as much as it does and keeps the game to under 20gb. Always get worried when new AAA games like GOW:R are bigger than around 90gb. * cough * COD * cough *
Not to mention with the sheer size of the game as well on an outdated hardware. Nintendo truly are amazing at optimizing.
THANK YOU for talking about this. I don't understand how they're getting this big and expensive to play. My pc runs Witcher 3 and GTA 5 and Sifu that's where it ends. I don't understand why they stopped optimizing games because more optimization means more customers.
I wish more well known personalities like yourself would speak out about this. Too many out there seem to be in bed with the big companies and promoting the garbage we are seeing.
I 100% AGREE TO THIS!!
Game devs definitely should optimize their games so that everyone can play and enjoy them, I truly hope they start taking that into consideration, Omega Strikers is a pretty good example for an optimized game (For example, it's shadows are a part of the game characters themselves and not a separate thing, that's why it doesn't lag at all and can run on many devices!)
I think that this is just one of the main aspects of decreasing quality of new games. Being a PC Gamer is such a headache nowadays just because the way every month you gotta worry about your new setup since there is a good chance that it might be too outdated for the game you’ve been waiting for.
As a low-mid spec gamer I feel it’s rare when I have to actually upgrade something on my pc. The constant worry is in these 1 off games that require a lot and often I don’t enjoy single player games anyways outside of a few. Games like Call of Duty however are starting to get ridiculous as I can’t get over 90 fps when playing specific maps. It’s a lack of optimization from the devs end as most maps run amazingly, but it’s just completely random if I’m getting 120 fps or locked down to 45 for a match.
I just bought a series X and it is crazy that you can install 10-20 360 games for every modern game. Although I was pretty surprised that Splinter Cell Blacklist was 30 gigs even back then.
the RTX 3080 isn't the "minimum" requirement, it's the "recommended", which is usually what they use for high/max settings at higher resolutions
the minimum that was listed was a 10 year old i7-4770, and a gtx 1060 which is less than $100 on ebay
I noticed this as well. I think his take on this topic in the first place is uneducated and bad. But anyways, this part of the video in particular is misleading
@@NerdWord still way to fuckin much for a game that looks like it could be ran on an Xbox 360 and runs on the switch let's be real. Also the size of games being genuinely stupid now is valid. No modern game needs to be 100gb if it's optimized properly. Ever
Yeah, have fun with that second hand $100 1060 which has already been burnt out from crypto mining.
@@NerdWord Never claimed I did. Anyways, whilst you were busy sucking the toes of lazy and inept game developers you still didn't actually explain how they're not massively unoptimized and need to actually take up 100gb of space in that pretentious preamble. All you did was explain how breath of the wild ran well at 720p whilst ignoring the fact it's 16gb and about 4 times bigger and way more in depth than most modern games and is running on essentially a mobile phone. So can you actually do something useful and explain why 100gb is reasonable for modern games?
I don’t consider myself to be a genius in coding or anything. But I’ve had multiple coding professors come up to me and request I optimize the code that they are teaching so that it will be optimized and often times more than not their code will be super inefficient. It’s absolutely crazy to me that as an undergrad student I am being requested by teachers to optimize their code. But the major puts so much stock into calculus and physics that I would have to get my PhD in order to get any degree related to coding. The current education system for coding and video game coding is so ass backwards it’s insane. And despite being this good at coding and getting my degree in cyber security which mind you doesn’t require calculus or physics but you an still get coding jobs with this degree. 99% of the opportunities to get a coding job required 5 years of experience that one percent requires an private/ personal connection to get the job. So no one is offering that experience but they are all expecting it. It’s absolutely insane that gaming companies have multiple younger people just joining the job force that have the ability to fix a lot of the problems they are facing but they are pushing away those younger people. It’s so ass backwards!
Zelda Tears of the kingdom being 16 Gigabytes is unreal
and it on a very dated hybrid console only is unreal. runs very unreal on yuzu (switch emulator) though! god bless emulation!
@@M4TTYN Where did you nab your ROM?
Damn that's the size of breath of the wild. Nintendo is a horrible terrible evil company but they sure know how to make their games fit on outdated and weak hardware
making games really really small like that is a bad thing. You want there to be decent textures in the game right? Lol
@@Xvladin the game arguably looks better than most
I didn't even know the Gollum game was releasing this year lol.
Yeah man, they expect these games to be played on the same hardware that the devs made the game on
Expecting the user has around 100gb of space free isn't too much to ask lol
@@Xvladin Not usually, but they don't even try to compress them or optimize the game's files when they can, leaving that job to pirates online who do that without compromising anything
@woof demon I guess in an ideal world games would be as small as possible, but I just don't think it's so agregious that it's worth spending time on saving the user 20gb of file space instead of working on the game.
Seems like the extra hardware is needed to pick up the slack the devs left behind 💀
I'm sticking to my 5700 XT till it burns out. Modern gaming cannot justify upgrading at the moment.
How do you need a super computer for a game that looks like play dough
Greed and laziness
Still on a 4790K & GTX1080 combo, and drive storage is the only crutch over time. Fortunately, not upgrading for a LONG time has helped to be able to afford more drive storage. It is pain to have to migrate, though.
Games really be 69.99 and be the absolute worst game possible (me asf after Hogwarts Legacy) (I will never get my refund)
Me after Cyberpunk
Me after fallout 76
@SwordieSlice that game launched at 29.99….
So you're saying Hogwarts Legacy is on the level of Cyberpunk and Fallout 76?
@Spidermanshark2 hogwarts legacy is fun and has a nice amount of content with a road map of free updates idk wtf he's on about
I theorize that besides PC being an after thought for several companies there is also a view that PC is a enthusiast's platform. With smartphones having many of the same functions as PCs, specially for more casual users, it's likely that there are less PCs by household than in the past and the industry has an idea that if your game is not meant for enthusiasts it is betten either on a console or on mobile. It also helps that the mobile audience is way more tolerant to predatory monetization.
And btw, as an unemployed person in the third world that plays exclusively on PC this ends up resulting in me not playing AAA releases at all.
What’s really nuts is that the Unreal Engine 5 editor package is only 60GB, and that includes a LOT that doesn’t go into a game, just for building games. The fact that the actual games are multiple times larger than the dev suite is nuts
Exactly I am so glad you made this I saw people defending Mortal Kombat’s new 100 GB. They are not actually optimizing these games they have loose files everywhere and are unwilling to compact and organize shit. It seems like they’re just gonna say use the high-end shit to make it look cooler when they’ve just have a loose files everywhere and bugs, hoping high end stuff will carry it and fix it. There’s no reason a fighting game should be 100 GB cyberpunk even broken had more going on in it and it was 70gb. This one is a curse all of us have to deal with not just PC. If a Mortal Kombat game is 100 gb when I hit someone I better be able to clearly see the most detailed tooth fly out of their mouth and have a humongous roster.
I have thought that if companies present at least 2 install sizes, this would subvert a lot of the problem. Install A: Max uncompressed, hyper-textures, super-gigantic 150 gb install. Install B: 20 gb (or even a lot less), sound and graphics compression/reduction that's pretty much indistinguishable from max install. I've played games that look and sound perfectly fine with tiny installs.
As a person studying to be a game dev and a working game tester, i find all this new trend really stupid. It saddened me to see it, i always loved gaming and how it can just make you forget for a bit and relax. At time point i have given up on big gaming companies and just play indie titles.
I have pretty much been stuck in the 80s and 90s with video games for the most part;
I am still playing SNES and Genesis games most of the time, and a little bit of N64 every now and then. Those games are very straight to the point, like "alright, let's go!", and you start playing _immediately,_ without a million forced cutscenes and crap like that.
I was already annoyed about the space requirements - But the other requirements ARE going nuts now that you mention it.
If it's a new game, I've been playing more AA/indie titles lately. Some of them are still well made. But even there, not all of them.
PREACH BROTHER! PREACH! Its honestly ridiculous how much space COD takes up
High system requirements, large storage required, no optimization, $70. And can't forget incomplete!
I 100% agree and have been bitching about it for years. They need to start compressing games and optimizing them.
I completely agree. I am someone who would considered poor. My best device i have is my latest vivo phone during that time. I have always, like actually my dream, to play a new released game. Like one of the earliest people to play the new game, and i mean like a pretty high-spec game that is. This might be cringe for some, but i must say it is one of the reason why genshin is so popular now. It makes people like me actually able to play for the first time, a new game that just been released. Of course their popularity has a lot of other factors such as the time it was released (covid/quarantine), it was very accessible to everybody, it has a lot of platforms available, etc. You have no idea how excited and in awe i was when i play it for the first time.
i’m not a game dev but i am a 3d animator and i’m certain this is happening cause they just use random 90g assets from unity or something without putting in an inkling of effort to compress or change them. so they end up with like a 400g lamp in the background
Info dump that answers the questions in this video. For the first part, The reason why games take up so much more space is because of 4k monitors. you need 4k textures in order to look good on a 4k monitor if your trying to have "realistic" graphics. When you jump in texture size, like 2k to 4k, the data cost is squared, not doubled, SQUARED. Games in 2015ish were using 2k textures, so there were like 20gb. a 20 gb game with 4k textures is now 4x the cost, 80gbs. Games that were 25gbs will now take 100gb of space, because the cost is squared. Also because its using an exponential cost, a little bit goes a long way in terms of storage size when the devs are adding stuff to the game. So why do games HAVE to be in 4k? because many AAA game studios get money from monitor manufactures to make them that way. So the Monitor companies can talk about how great this game will look on their 4k monitors. Same thing with graphics card companies or computer manufacturers like alienware. Compression has artifacts, which can lower quality, unacceptable if you have a big contract with a monitor or graphics card company. Japanese companies generally dont have these contracts. Graphics card companies are American, French or German. Thats why alot of Japanese games dont have this problem, they dont have those contracts!
When those contracts end, devs can then compress graphics, which is why sometimes they're updates that later lower the disk space. But many of the good compression software is 3rd party owned, which means devs have to pay to use that stuff and that increases dev cost. It also costs money to update a game, especially on PS or XBOX, you have to pay them to update, bigger patch, higher cost. So some devs just dont bother to update after contracts end cause a texture patch will be big size and therefore expensive, and i mean consumers already bought it so not like that money spent is gonna get new customers. Big execs will never sign off on that cost increase. Also many devs now just view 4k as standard as they themselves all usually have 4k (or bigger) monitors. Theres alot of moving parts to this...
Audio can also eat up a TON of space, and many games have more expanded audio tracks so they can sell them to make some more money.
For the second part, Computer minimum requirements: There is a ton of new software that has completely changed the way games are being developed, but this new tech requires modern graphics cards. There is a complex relationship between videogame developers and graphics card companies. This new tech does not work with old graphics cards. Game devs are in a weird place where they have to choose between this new tech and the new work flows (which are easier and much faster!) but limited to newer graphics cards; Nvidia RTX 1080 or newer or equivalent. Or to use the old ways, which is a more difficult workflow and longer dev time with a potentially worse looking end product. There are also often contracts made with computer part companies to consider. Some game devs are just so happy to do these new things that they dont care about selling to old graphics card, they want to play with their new shiny toys! ive actually struggled with this myself working with prototypes, the new tech is so cool and easy to use and so tempting to use >.> game devs will understand, but i can see why consumers dont. Not AI though, devs must avoid A.I like the plague or the lawyers will yell at you because of legal stuff happening everywhere. You cant copyright or own anything produced by A.I, thats bad for companies selling a product since they kinda need to own it in order to sell it. if you were still reading this post and wondering about how A.I impacts game dev, there ya go.
They're have been several breakthroughs in technology that has put game developement in an awkward position, it will probably be another 2 years before things start to smooth out. till then just always make sure to adjust the graphics setting to you PC's abilities.
I appreciate wheb games let you individually select whether you want to install the super high quality textures to save yourself a ton of storage
The high requirements and large size is from the marketing department: the reasoning is "If we display the most high end stats, we can demand a higher price and that's what the modern consumer expects." "If the file size is huge, we can charge more for it." It sadly is as simple as that.
this could be caused by studios not hiring enough programmers and actual IT ppl.
While i was studying in college we would fet a failing grade on programs being too large and non optimized
I can see this becoming more and more of a Key Selling Point for cloud gaming services like GeForce, as games get bigger and higher specced. Unfortunately, will that wind up being the same "expensive rabbit hole" as "In order to watch all my favourite shows I need Netflix and Paramount and Amazon and..." 😕
The whole AAA industry needs an overhaul. Once games stop getting sharted out at lightspeed with unreachable deadlines, developers can start focusing on stuff like optimization and reducing disk space. As it is right now, they're struggling to even make playable games by release.
What I'm tired of with the Gaming Industry honestly myself, is the complete lack of local couch co-op support in today's modern video games. I literally had to build my spouse their own gaming PC, family-share my Steam library, then purchase additional keys for these modern co-op games that absolutely refused to allow for local co-op of the same magnitude found in 'It Takes Two'.
Yes, I completely get and understand why they do this. To sell more copies of the same game, but that doesn't, you know, make it any less of a really shitty practice.
Some studios have always been lazy in the optimization department.
I learnt this the hard way over 13 years ago when COD4 and MW2 ran good on my toaster PC, but WaW and Black Ops were dogwater on PC, looking and running awful at the same time, deapite being in the exact same engine as the other 2 entries that ran perfectly fine.
Let us just say that Treyarch was never the spearhead in the technology department of COD games, and their very first games shwoed that big time. Deapite the giant budgets, they never knew what the word optimization meant.
I remember looking at PS3’s online not long after they announced the PS3 Slim (2009) & I immediately ruled out the 250GB PS3 Slim bc I thought the 120GB PS3 Slim was adequate for the amount of games I would actually play. Then I thought “well, even 120GB is more than I need. Maybe I’ll just stick with the 80GB standard PS3.”
Now it’s around 135GB just to have Fortnite, Rocket League, & Apex Legends stored on my console to casually play when I have down time. I would be in trouble if I played more than just an hour or two at night after my son goes to bed. Even then, I have an XSX that has about 800GB of usable space & with casual games & a few single player games, my hard drive is almost 90% full.
With storage sizes you gotta remember consoles like the series s only come with 500gb and it costs well over $100 to get a 1tb SSD hard drive (ssd is required for next gen games) and that’s with a price drop
Literally the only thing separating a large chunk of the audience from being able to play good games, is the paywall that is hardware and software requirements.
As someone who had to visit the school's computer lab more than anyone else because I couldn't afford a decent one at home, I feel the pain of the masses.
the GB thing is mostly textures, so a single 4k or 8k texture could be 1 GB easily, uncompressed. and as a solo dev, i can say that the optimization process is a real pain in the ass. even for experts in an AAA studio it would take months to fully optimize each scene/location, and that's only for one rig, not to mention consoles. also it doesn't make sense to optimize games for toasters since that's a tiny market share and programmers are expensive as fuck.
since learning this, i'm surprised games like Cyberpunk even launch, and realized i was a spoiled gamer. but that doesn't mean we should bend over, of course.
I'm a huge fan of Elder Scrolls and been playing Skyrim all my life. And I'm facing the reality that I probably won't be able to run TES6 even on the most shit graphics I could use, since I will definitely not have the money for a new gen gaming pc.
The lack of care for non-wealthy gamers by big companies is so sad and frustrating. It might be silly, but I would genuinely be heartbroken and devastated if I won't be able to run TES6, cuz I've been waiting my whole life for it. Ugh, I feel the frustration, Charlz, same here.
For me, PC gaming has always been about catching up with vintage titles that i didnt get to play when i was a kid. Keeping up with modern specs to play modern games is just waaaay too expensive. It's easier to just have a console (especially a portable one like the switch).
I have to say this is probably intentional, people that crack games usually don't have good computers. The result is not that more people are playing AAA games, now more than never, people are playing alternative indie games. A big part of the enjoyment in video games is sharing your experience. I hate League and I hate Riot even more, but the idea of a free game with "customizations" for people that like the game spend is just genius. Also allowing small creators to make a revenue out of internal mechanics, like levels in Mario Maker, and take a fair share would also be a great idea. Companies are failing to understand that a lot individual hobbies have a community spirit.
Optimization requires time and better programmers. Both cost money. The AAA companies choose not to "waste" that money because people buy the products anyway.
As a PC player with a 3050 i agree I payed for a 1000$ Nitro 5 Acer gaming laptop and it can barely run roblox without constantly crashing in perspective. Specs mean nothing too.
Processor: Intel Core i5-4690 / AMD Ryzen 3 1300X.
Memory: 8 GB RAM.
Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1060, 6GB / AMD Radeon R9 290X, 4GB.
DirectX: Version 12.
Storage: 45 GB available space.
That doesn't seem terrible
Sucks for console players too because now you can only have about 2-3 games installed at once if you're lucky. If you want to go back to another game, you have to delete one of your current ones and redownload the previous title. And it's for the most unnecessary and basic games as well. I could be playing a dozen or more AAA games released from 2014-2017 with the same space I now use for 1-2 games released in 2019-2023 on the same original, outdated console.
I feel like some companies just rely on modders to fix a buggy game
Dude. Agree. And honestly. It doesn't look like a trend that isn't even going away any time soon.
I play games on a normal work/school laptop, decently priced a few years ago when I bought it, but still it didn't come with a good graphics card as it wasn't intended for gaming initially. I know that's my own doing, but it is a shame when the first thing I check about a game recommended by a friend is the minimum requirements to run, rather than watching a trailer or even the price
My biggest irritation is with the TPM shit, I upgraded to Windows 11 on an unsupported device (mind you it is only 2 years old and so is the hardware) It is unsupported because it had no TPM 2.0 . My fault ig for not checking that first. But now I can't play valorant and people are saying this should be the standard, now I'm just scared for what's coming ahead. There has to be a better anti-cheat solution than just banning hardware. Anyways that was my rant 🤓☝️
Yeah I easily hate the TPM 2.0 requirements. Why should I give game companies root access to my computer just to play a fps? Made it much easier to avoid riot games and others that support it. There are much better methods and tpm is just downright lazy.
@@NrettG preach
as a genuinely poor person I seriously appreciate this video, I'm having to use cloud services to play almost any modern triple A game
Reminder that There’s a Sword Art Online game on Playstation that is over 100 gb for the base install