Why modern games are 150 GB

A game that fits on a 700 MB disc in 1999 has a descendant that needs 150 GB. The game is not two hundred times longer. Most of the growth is in a handful of specific places.

Textures dominate

The single largest contributor. Texture memory scales with the square of resolution — doubling a texture's dimensions quadruples its size. A jump from 1K to 4K textures across thousands of assets accounts for a very large share of a modern install.

It's also why many games now ship optional high-resolution texture packs separately. The base game is playable; the pack is for people with the hardware and the storage.

Audio, often uncompressed

The counter-intuitive one. Games frequently ship audio at low compression or none at all, and it's a deliberate trade: decompressing audio costs CPU time, and during a busy scene with dozens of simultaneous sounds that cost is real. Storage is cheaper than frame time.

Add full voice acting in a dozen languages and audio can occupy a startling fraction of the install. This is why some launchers now let you deselect language packs — often the quickest way to reclaim tens of gigabytes.

Deliberate duplication

This one sounds like a bug and isn't. Games sometimes store multiple copies of the same asset at different points on the disk so that a level load reads one continuous stretch rather than seeking all over the drive.

On mechanical drives, seeking was catastrophically slow, so duplicating data to keep reads sequential was a straightforward win. Modern consoles with fast SSDs and hardware decompression need this far less, which is part of why some current-generation versions of a game are smaller than their predecessors.

Video

Pre-rendered cutscenes are video files, and video is large. Many engines now render cinematics in-engine instead, which is one of the few things that has pushed sizes down.

What you can do about it

• Remove language packs. Check the game's properties in its launcher. Frequently the biggest single saving available.
• Skip optional high-res texture packs unless you have the display and GPU to use them. On a 1080p screen they change very little.
• Delete campaign or multiplayer components where the game allows it. Several large titles let you install modes separately.
• Move rarely played games to a slower drive. Load times suffer; storage costs plummet. Most launchers support multiple install locations and moving without re-downloading.
• Check for redundant installs. Owning a game on two storefronts means two copies.

The bandwidth problem underneath

Size isn't only a storage issue. A 150 GB download on a slow connection is a day, and patches compound it — some update systems re-download far more than the part that changed, because of how the data is packed.

If you're on a metered or slow connection, this is worth planning around: schedule downloads overnight, use a launcher's bandwidth scheduling if it has one, and check whether your platform supports downloading to a different device and transferring locally.

Will it keep growing?

Probably more slowly. Hardware decompression on current consoles means data can be stored compressed and expanded on the fly, removing much of the reason for duplication. Better texture compression formats help. Some recent titles have shipped smaller than their predecessors, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Set against that, higher-resolution assets and more detailed worlds push the other way. The realistic expectation is continued growth at a gentler rate rather than the steep curve of the last decade.