Gaming in the 8th Generation: Video Game Sizes

Gaming in the 8th Generation

Video Game Sizes - A Gig Too Far

I've played games my whole life. I've always had a somewhat-large collection of games to compliment the console(s) I actively use. I have owned;

• over 200 PS2 games
• 100 PS1 games
• 400 Xbox 360 games both physical and digital (as well as arcade titles)
• about 40-50 PS3 games (I got the console late on)
• about 10 Gamecube games (I got the console in 2013)
• roughly 12-13 Xbox Original games (same reason)
• Over 300 PC games to my name, including Steam purchases, which is in the +130 region, as well as Origin (20 something games) and about 60 physical games.

and I still own about 20 Sega MegaDrive games (only in recent years have I discovered buying these games off eBay, which I have been doing now and then)

I currently own over 50 PS4 games;

• 17 Physical
• ~40 Digital (Both owned and with PS Plus)

And I have a handy amount of Xbox One games. That library is growing, slowly but surely.

I imagine one would wonder why I'm putting down the amount of games I've owned throughout my life. Well, I don't mean to brag, or gloat, because believe me, there are people out there with ridiculously larger collections than I do.

But the reason I'm saying all this is, I'm here to ask: What is the difference between playing games in today's generation and playing games of generations past?

The answer is this:

Between 1993 and 2013, I have enjoyed playing my games whenever I wanted. If I felt like turning one game off and putting another game on, I could just eject the disc, place it in it's case, grab another game, insert that disc, and play away...

But recently, with the likes of my PS4 and Xbox One, I'm now becoming aware of the sizes games have become, not in scale of visible content, but rather in size of data.

What I mean is, for the first time ever, I'm experiencing having to uninstall a game I'm not actively playing to make room for another game I want to play because my console's hard drive (on both consoles) is 500GB, and I have to install every game I first boot, as mandatory.

To rub salt into these little wounds, along with large game installs comes the now-expected Day-One Patches with some of these games. These patches are the bane of gaming today, as games are now being released too early (to fit a specified target date) and as a result, the remaining fixes for the game are left to us gamers to download in order to play the game in a stable state. Now, in the previous generations, there were patches for games that were updated on a regular basis to keep the games stable, the Xbox 360's games would have regular updates that never took any longer than a maximum of 60 seconds, and some as quick as 3 seconds.

The PS3 was a little bit more sinister as any fresh game would require every patch and update to be downloaded to date, which would result in some rather long waiting times for these updates to download. It wasn't the case with every game, thankfully.

But with today's generation, digital games are becoming the norm, and large game sizes are slowly becoming common. 

To elaborate further on the difference between playing games today as opposed to previous generations, I now experience the dread of bothering to install, and update a game whenever I feel like playing it.

I'll use a perfect example of this.

On my Xbox One, I have GTA V and Halo: The Master Chief Collection on physical copy. GTA V is 60 GB, and Halo is between 40 and 50GB if I remember correctly. Those are some large game sizes. I will never delete GTA V off my Xbox because it's my favourite game on that system at the moment, and it's my go-to game if I can't think of any other game to play on that console.

But with Halo, there have been moments where I've needed to save a significant amount of space on my HDD and I have hesitated on uninstalling Halo from my HDD because whenever I decide to reinstall that game, I have to sit through that day-one patch download again, which is over 20GB.

It has gotten to a stage now where the games that I have uninstalled, I have thought about playing them another time, and when that time comes, I'm discouraged from doing so, because I have a fear of needing to download large patches for that game.

I uninstalled Forza 5 two months ago. But last week I wanted to play some Forza 5 again, so I decided to install the game. It was taking a long time to install and update the game so I stopped the installation and looked for something else.

It's bad now, when I look at this generation of games and I have to pick and choose my games carefully. Think of what game I MIGHT play again in the following week and what game I have no interest in playing until further notice.

Back in the day, I never had that problem. If I was playing GTA 3, and I felt like playing FIFA 2002 later, all I had to do was save my game, turn the game off and insert FIFA 2002 and I'd be playing it within 3 minutes of swapping the games. Then after a brief hour or so playing FIFA 2002 I'd have felt like playing some Def Jam Vendetta so I would turn FIFA off, put it back on the shelf and insert Def Jam Vendetta and fire up the Story Mode.

Nowadays, I have 17 physical PS4 games and I have to think of up to 4 games I want to have installed because of the size they are. It's worse with the Xbox One because I have 2 games installed that take up a total of ~120GB of my HDD space. I can't find myself to get into the mood to play Battlefield 4 because I'll have to download the latest patch AND download all my map packs, which is unbearable to think of considering the fact each map pack is about 4GB.

I have went from playing 10 different games a day to playing maybe two games for the whole day and barely giving myself any encouragement to play any more, all because of the thought of waiting for everything to install/download.

Digital games are worse. I might have unlimited download speeds, but if I'm in the mood to redownload and play a particular game, I can't satisfy that mood right away, I have to download this ridiculously large game which will take 6 or 7 hours to download and by the time it's done, I'm not interested anymore.

I miss being able to switch from game to game on the fly whenever I wanted with any game I had. I didn't have to take 17 games and select up to 5 to install. I liked having my options there for me. I liked looking at my shelf of games and going through all of them to decide on what game to insert and play. I can't really do that anymore. I have to look through my shelf and select a game I want to wait to play.

Right now at this moment I want to play Forza Horizon 2. But it's uninstalled and it's a digital copy and I don't want to wait to download it, to be uninterested after it finishes, or play it for the remaining hour I have left of any interest at all.

Reading back over some of my paragraphs, I realized I sound like an over-entitled little b*tch with too much time on his hands and has nothing but first-world problems and too many games, and I apologize for coming across that way.

Let me elaborate. I said I have "owned" the number of games had in the past. The present tense says different. I no longer have the 400 games for the Xbox 360 as I don't even have an Xbox 360 at all, anymore. Any games I have left for that system would be the digital arcade titles licensed to me - bought over the course of 7 years of owning the console.

I also no longer have a PS3, and I have barely any digital games bar a few PSone classics to look back on.

I still have a PS2, Xbox Original, GameCube and SEGA Megadrive, but they're mostly for collection and nostalgia purposes, and even then, I don't buy games for them as often as I could be. But I digress.

The problem I'm having with games nowadays is a problem many gamers are facing - not just me. I'm just one of few that is blogging about it :P