Why Are Modern Games So Huge? The Evolution of Game File Sizes

40 Kilobytes Was Enough for Everyone

On July 15, 1983, small red-and-white boxes labeled “Family Computer” appeared on store shelves in Japan. Despite the name, these devices had little in common with real PCs: the Famicom was Nintendo’s first true gaming console (not counting the Color TV Game 6, which was essentially a Pong clone). The original Nintendo Family Computer for the Japanese market had its share of issues: the first version was unreliable and plagued by hardware and software bugs. But after a revision, the Famicom became Japan’s most popular console, selling over 2.5 million units by the end of 1984—a record at the time. In June 1985, Nintendo introduced the Famicom to North America as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), with a new look and an improved cartridge loading system. A year later, the NES hit Europe as well.

In America, the NES was just as popular. Initially, Nintendo planned to sell the console only in New York, but the first batch of 50,000 units sold out so quickly that within three months, the NES was available nationwide. Even after the 16-bit Sega Genesis/Mega Drive arrived, the NES remained a global sales leader into the 1990s. Production continued in limited runs until October 2003, and official support ended only in 2007—a record in the fast-moving gaming industry. In total, about 60.9 million NES consoles and over 500 million cartridges were sold worldwide.

What was the secret to the NES’s popularity? Great games, of course—but no matter how fun a game is, parents won’t buy a console if it’s too expensive. To keep the launch price at $200, Nintendo’s engineers had to make many compromises. Game developers had it even tougher: they had to create engaging games that fit into just 40 kilobytes—the standard cartridge size, which also had to stay affordable.

Each NES cartridge had only two memory chips: one for 8 KB and another for 32 KB. Adding more chips would have made cartridges—and games—much more expensive, which Nintendo wanted to avoid. That’s why Super Mario Bros. was such a sensation: the developers squeezed 32 unique levels, secrets, and complex gameplay into just 40 KB, earning a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling video game in history.

In 2018, indie studio Morphcat Games set out to repeat this feat, creating a retro platformer that respected all the original NES hardware limitations. The result, Micro Mages, launched on May 1, 2019, and is available both digitally and as a real NES cartridge. The game features 26 unique levels across 8 worlds, multiplayer for up to four players, and a variety of gameplay mechanics—all within 40 KB. The developers used several clever tricks to make this possible:

• 32 KB was allocated for game logic and data, 8 KB for graphics (4 KB for sprites, 4 KB for static objects).
• Each sprite was 8×8 pixels with 3 colors, and the NES could only display 8 sprites per scanline and 4 palettes at once.
• To save memory, characters and enemies shared palettes, and only one sprite was used per character/enemy, sacrificing detail for performance.
• Bosses were built from repeating sprite elements, using mirroring and rotation to minimize unique sprites.
• Environments were constructed from a small set of tiles, combined and mirrored to create complex scenes, with only 60 bytes needed to store a scene’s data.
• To avoid obvious symmetry and keep gameplay interesting, developers used spare bits in data bytes to shift rows horizontally, creating asymmetrical layouts without using extra memory.

These kinds of smart optimizations allowed developers to create engaging games decades ago, working within severe hardware limits.

Optimization? Never Heard of It

As consoles and PCs became more powerful, developers still had to be inventive. Take Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, where the protagonist could shift between material and spectral worlds. To allow seamless transitions, both versions of a location had to be in memory at once. But the PlayStation only had 2 MB of RAM and 1 MB of VRAM, so developers used background loading: as the player moved through corridors or caves, the game quietly loaded new areas and unloaded old ones. This trick was used in many games, sometimes less elegantly—think of the doors in Resident Evil or elevators in Mass Effect. Sometimes, technical limitations inspired creative solutions, like the fog in Silent Hill, which hid the limited draw distance.

But as hardware improved, developers stopped counting every bit. Today, optimization often takes a back seat, especially in big-budget projects. Gamers who remember the impact of Crysis know how impressive it looked—even by today’s standards. But have any games since then wowed you as much, purely with their visuals? Probably not. While modern AAA games have sharper textures, better lighting, and more polygons, these improvements often require top-tier hardware that’s overkill for most professional tasks. Ultimately, it’s the big publishers who benefit: flashy graphics help sell games to the mass market, and marketing campaigns highlight every technical feature, even if most players won’t notice them.

Sometimes, this leads to odd situations. For example, Metro: Exodus uses ray tracing, but to support older graphics cards, developers also included traditional rasterization. The difference is subtle: with RTX on, characters are lit more realistically, but even on a top-end RTX 2080 Ti, enabling ray tracing can drop FPS to 45 in some scenes, with little visible benefit elsewhere. 4A Games has already announced that future titles will use ray tracing exclusively, as it simplifies development—no more painstaking manual lighting setups. While this could eventually lead to truly photorealistic graphics, for now, the minimal difference and high hardware demands mean players are paying more so developers can work less. As Sylvain Trottier, producer of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, said back in 2013: “Console games require optimization due to hardware limits. On PC, if a gamer lacks performance, they can just buy a new graphics card.” And maybe a new motherboard, CPU, more RAM, and a faster SSD, too.

How Many Gigabytes Is Enough?

In recent years, game install sizes have exploded. Where open-world games once took up a few dozen gigabytes, today even linear shooters can easily require 150–200 GB of disk space. Here are the top 10 largest games by install size:

• Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare — 175 GB
• Final Fantasy XV — 148 GB
• Gears of War 4 — 136 GB
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 — 113 GB
• Red Dead Redemption 2 — 112 GB
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War — 105 GB
• Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare — 101 GB
• Quantum Break — 76.5 GB
• Grand Theft Auto V — 76 GB
• Gears 5 — 66 GB

These numbers are telling. Gears 5 is the biggest and most advanced game in its series, yet it’s half the size of Gears of War 4 and looks great—proving that optimization pays off. Red Dead Redemption 2 is huge, but its massive world and attention to detail justify the size. Meanwhile, Call of Duty keeps getting bigger, despite lacking open worlds or cutting-edge graphics. The reason? Activision’s rapid release schedule leaves little time for optimization.

As game sizes grow, large and fast storage becomes essential. But is a regular HDD enough? Unfortunately, no. The table below (not shown) lists RAM and VRAM usage for the most demanding recent games (measured at 4K ultra settings). To load game files into RAM and VRAM, they must first be read from storage. A top gaming HDD can read at 227 MB/s. If a game like Battlefield V uses 20 GB of RAM and VRAM, it would take about 88 seconds to load all resources—over a minute and a half! In practice, things are more complex, but this gives a sense of how storage speed affects load times.

For open-world games, slow storage can also hurt minimum FPS, since the system can’t keep all assets for a huge map like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in memory at once. As you play, files are constantly loaded in the background, and if storage is too slow, the CPU and GPU can’t prepare new frames quickly enough, causing frame drops. That’s why a high-performance SSD is now a necessity for gaming PCs—not just for speed, but for capacity, as games keep getting bigger. Thankfully, even fast NVMe SSDs are now affordable.

For example, the WD Blue SN550 1TB NVMe SSD (at the time of writing, priced around 10,500–11,000 rubles) uses four PCI Express 3.0 lanes for up to 2,400 MB/s sequential read speeds—60% faster than two-lane NVMe SSDs and over four times faster than SATA SSDs. This is thanks to the interface: SATA tops out at 560 MB/s, while a single PCIe 3.0 lane can handle 985 MB/s, and four lanes allow for even higher speeds. The SN550 also uses 96-layer 3D NAND for greater capacity and reliability, with a 600 TB write endurance (compared to 400 TB for similar SATA SSDs).

If you want the fastest possible system and don’t mind spending more, check out the WD_BLACK SN750 NVMe SSD series for hardcore gamers. With an eight-channel controller and firmware optimizations, the 1TB model reaches up to 3,470 MB/s read and 3,000 MB/s write speeds. The 2TB flagship is slightly slower due to higher-capacity chips but can still hold a dozen massive AAA games with ease.

The SN750 also features a large heatsink for stable performance under heavy load and a special Gaming Mode in the SSD Dashboard utility, which disables power-saving features to minimize latency. This makes the WD_BLACK SN750 an ideal choice for high-performance gaming PCs, ensuring instant load times and stable frame rates—even in poorly optimized games.