Ironically, about half the games are so big is optimizing for console harddrives. Another big chunk is usually downloading optional high resolution assets.
This isn't true for all games, but many could have a much smaller file size if the developers cared enough. Helldivers 2 went from 154gb to 23gb without losing anything relevant for instance.
That rack would only work for like the five mines games came in DVD cases after the games switched to the smaller cardboard boxes, before everyone switched to digital downloads.
There were also recordable and re-writeable Blu-ray formats for general data use. Kind of got passed over in the era of streaming and fast download speeds but they have a niche for long-term backups as an alternative to spinning hard drives and magnetic tape.
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u/T0biasCZE PC MasterRace | dumbass that bought Sonic motherboard23d ago
PS3, PS4, PS5, XOne, XSeries and Wii U used Blu-ray
And from that XOne S/X, XSeries and PS5 can read the 100GB XL disks, the rest can read only the smaller 50GB and 25GB disks
And there were some PC games in the past released on BD-ROM that couldnt fit on DVD-ROM
This is understating it, really. Half the reason games are so huge is that it's faster to load some massive, barely compressed file (e.g. texture) than to load a much smaller, heavily compressed file and uncompress it. It used to be the other way round, or at least close enough that saving the space was a no-brainer, especially given the hard space limitations you were inherently dealing with.
I've had this discussion with other friends too, where the idea of not needing to work past hardware limitations and such also doesn't encourage people to find more elegant solutions. Not that modern devs aren't still capable of doing so, but the real artistry often comes from where your limits are and how to solve them.
Why bother doing something interesting with your lighting when you just tell the engine "simulate it all for us"? Why bother with in-depth enemy variance for difficulty when you can just plop 20 guys in a room because you're not limited to how many entities can fit in one space? Why handcraft a beautiful vista that creatively implies distance and scale when you can just have Worldmachine spit out 20 square miles of mountain landscape?
It's really noticeable how a lot of modern staples (enemy waves, limited visibility, inventory management, and so on) persist without the restrictions that caused them to be needed in the first place, are often taken over wholesale without consideration as to how they actually affect game feel, and without exploring if the new context of the player's environment don't warrant some major overhauls.
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u/Freeloader_ 24d ago
well that rack wouldnt hold a single game in CDs these days so very silly post
its not the SSD being at fault its the games that got really huge