Windows 10: Game install sizes

I don't play a whole load of games. Not that I wouldn't like to but the children dominate the TVs and our time. By the time they are in bed my wife and i are too exhausted after the working day and sorting family life out. I tried playing Fifa online the other night and fell asleep during a match.

anyway tonight I finally got a decent chance to go on the Xbox one. I had a boxed copy of halo 5 guardians I bought a while back. So I thought ok, install it and maybe there will be a few gigs patch after that. I nearly fell off my chair when on top of the approx 50 gig install it went online to download another 40 odd gigs. The whole install comes to 90 gigs. Aside from wasting two hours waiting it has also gobbled up most of the internal storage. I'm now too tired to try it out. I'm lucky enough to have a decent enough broadband speed of 60 megabits but many still toil on much slower speeds so such large updates seems over the top. But is this really the norm nowadays? I thought games taking 30-40 gigs was extreme but this is nearly 100 gigs install size. It's a bit alarming. Please tell me that halo 5 is a one off!

:)

 

Can't download asphalt 8

I'm pretty sure you dont have enough space to download and install the game. The above suggestion will perhaps go around some of those problems, but I don't know if it'll still be enough free space for that game. The size shown in the store is the DOWNLOAD
size. Installation sizes tend to be much larger.

 

unable to download gameloft games(as per offer) in lumia 525

might be due to the size of the game. i usually give myself at least four times the size of the installation file, to take up for the game itself. in this case, i would try and free up another GB or so if you can.

 

100 GB install size is pretty rare, but 50-60 GB installs are becoming more and more common these days, on both Xbox and PC.

According to Complete List of Xbox One Install Sizes - over 350 Titles | finder.com, Halo 5: Guardians is the second largest Xbox One game in terms of install size (~98 GB), behind only Gears of War at 116 GB. The third largest is the Halo: Master Chief Collection at around 63 GB. So, yeah, it seems like you just managed to get one of the larger game installs in the entire XB1 library.

 

Don't be surprised to see 50 GB+ on modern games. It's about graphic quality and on line content. BF1 is 60GB, BF4 a little older is 44GB. GOW4 is also over the top at 114GB. A very old game like BFBC2 is only 8GB and you can see it in poor graphic quality compared to more modern games. COD IW is 93GB, Doom 67GB, GTA V 71GB, Ghost Recon Wildlands 53GB. So you get the picture.

 

You can always compress games directories - in my experience without any impact on performance at all.

For example compact /c /s:"C:\Steam" /i /f /exe:xpress16k

It doesn't help with download size but does with disk use.

 

If you're really squeezed for space, you can just enable NTFS compression on the drive that your games are installed (be careful if it's C drive, Windows might not boot). It's a feature that's been built into Windows for a long time. You can also do this on a per-folder/per-file basis. Just right click on the drive/folder/file you want to compress, go to Properties. There should be an "Advanced" box near the bottom, select the appropriate option, then click Apply then OK. It might take awhile depending on your CPU, RAM, and drive speed. I've done it before, in my experience it does slow games down (especially newer ones, old ones should run fine), so only do it if you feel like you have to.

 

Thanks guys. I had no idea things were getting so large! I'll avoid gears of war then. I will just buy an external hard drive at some point. I guess I find it odd that a graphical stunner like crysis 1 manages to only be a fifth of the size and look just as good. But I guess it's the multiplayer content that swells things on halo. Thanks for that install size link, that will be a useful point of reference

 

Hitman was about 40gig and Mass Effect Andromeda was 60, I am not sure why they are getting so large, don't they use compression any more?

 

As @specialkone has pointed out, graphics and online content are the biggest reasons why games are getting so big. Textures especially take up a lot of space, just keep in mind that (generally) the better a game looks, the bigger it will be. Game graphics are already approaching real-life quality, and there's VR too. I remember back in the days, people thought a game that was several gigs was huge. But back then, hard drives weren't as big either. Now storage space is cheap and plentiful.

 

Wolfenstein 3D installed on a floppy lol.

 

Defender in 16 KB, LOL.
It's all relative....

 

Indeed I remember the size of the Spectrum games which were larger than the zx81 counterparts lol.

 

Yes, I remember games like Microprose Pacific Air Wars. If I remember correctly, back to 1994, had to install it with about a dozen diskettes, then in DOS mode, had to disable CD Rom to free up memory for the game to run, had to LH (load high) various resources. Loved the game at the time. Found this video. Look at the graphic quality *ROFLMAO2

[youtube]dl3Q_PqLk8M[/youtube]

I'll take 60GB games, Nvidia turf effects and fire, HTFS shadows and "expensive" GPU's to run those amazing graphic features over the old days. But the old days were still fun.

 

[youtube]HcF2KI7y3CY[/youtube]