When Did Every Game Become 150GB? The Case for Smaller Installs

There was a time when installing a game meant clearing a few gigabytes of hard drive space and getting on with your life. That time is gone. Modern AAA titles routinely ship at 100GB or more, with some pushing past 150GB before you’ve even downloaded the first patch. Call of Duty has famously ballooned to the point where installing one game means negotiating with every other program on your drive for survival. And it’s not just shooters — open-world RPGs, sports games, and even remasters of decade-old titles now arrive with install sizes that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

The obvious question is: why? And the less obvious but more interesting question is: does any of this actually make the games better?

Where the Bloat Comes From

Game file sizes have grown for a mix of legitimate and less legitimate reasons. On the legitimate side, higher resolution textures and assets take up more space. A character model rendered at 4K needs significantly more data than one built for 1080p. Audio is another major contributor — uncompressed or lightly compressed audio files eat storage fast, and many studios ship multiple language packs by default whether you need them or not. Cutscenes stored as pre-rendered video rather than running in-engine add gigabytes that you’ll watch exactly once.

Then there’s the less legitimate side. Redundant data is a bigger problem than most players realize. Some games duplicate assets across multiple folders to reduce loading times on mechanical hard drives — a reasonable tradeoff in 2015, less so in 2026 when most gaming PCs run SSDs. Lazy packaging is another factor. When a studio pushes a 30GB patch that only changes a few hundred megabytes of actual content, it’s often because the patching system replaces entire archive files rather than individual assets within them. The player pays the storage cost for engineering shortcuts they’ll never see.

None of this is inherently broken. Big games with detailed worlds and high-fidelity visuals will naturally be large. The problem is that file size has become decoupled from the actual gaming experience. A 120GB install doesn’t guarantee a better time than a 2GB one. It just guarantees you’ll be waiting longer to find out.

The Games That Prove Bigger Isn’t Better

Some of the most played and most replayed games in recent memory are a fraction of the size that modern AAA titles demand. Geometry Dash is barely over 300MB and has held an enormous player base for years through pure mechanical depth — tight controls, a relentless difficulty curve, and a level editor that’s spawned millions of community creations. No 4K cutscenes. No 50GB texture packs. Just a square jumping to music, and somehow that’s enough to keep people playing for thousands of hours.

Celeste shipped at under 1.2GB and won universal acclaim for its platforming, its story, and its accessibility options. Hollow Knight delivered 40+ hours of hand-drawn exploration in about 9GB. Undertale changed the way people think about RPG storytelling in 200MB. Stardew Valley, built by one person, has outsold most AAA franchises and weighs in at around 500MB.

These aren’t exceptions. They’re evidence of something the industry keeps forgetting: gameplay is not a function of file size. A game’s ability to hold your attention has nothing to do with how much storage it demands. If anything, the constraint of working within smaller file sizes often forces developers to be more creative with their design, their art direction, and their mechanics. When you can’t brute-force quality with raw asset volume, you have to actually design something worth playing.

The Storage Tax on Players

There’s a real cost to bloated installs that goes beyond waiting for downloads. Storage isn’t free, and not every player has a 2TB NVMe drive to work with. Laptop gamers, budget PC builders, and anyone in a region with slower or metered internet connections feels the squeeze hardest. When one game takes up 150GB, that’s three or four smaller games you can’t have installed at the same time. It creates an artificial barrier that has nothing to do with whether your hardware can actually run the game.

This is part of why platforms that curate smaller PC games have built such dedicated audiences. There’s a massive category of players who specifically look for quality titles that don’t require them to delete half their library to make room. Games under 1GB, games that run on integrated graphics, games that download in minutes instead of hours — these aren’t compromises. For a lot of players, they’re preferences.

And the numbers back it up. Some of the most consistently downloaded and revisited titles in PC gaming are under 5GB. Players return to them because they’re easy to reinstall, quick to launch, and designed around mechanics rather than spectacle. There’s no 40GB day-one patch standing between you and the game. You click, you play.

What the Industry Could Learn

Nobody’s arguing that big games shouldn’t exist. There’s a place for sprawling open worlds and photorealistic environments that push hardware to its limits. The issue is that bloated file sizes have become the default rather than a deliberate choice. Studios ship 100GB+ installs not because the game requires it, but because optimization takes time and storage is treated as infinite. It’s not.

The developers who take file size seriously — who compress thoughtfully, who design systems that are elegant rather than enormous — tend to produce games that are more respectful of the player’s time and resources in every other way too. It’s a signal of craft. When a developer ships a tight, well-optimized build, they’re telling you they thought about the experience from the player’s side, not just their own.

Meanwhile, the next Call of Duty install is probably going to ask for 200GB. And somewhere, a solo developer is building something extraordinary in under a gigabyte. One of them will be remembered as a classic. The other will be overwritten by next year’s sequel.

Place your bets on which is which.