Who doesn’t love to play games? Everyone loves to play video games. Even the game industry is one of the biggest industries in the tech world. Nowadays it is becoming much bigger because of the great games that many game development companies are launching. 

If we keep an eye on the statistics, then we’ll see in 2022 the game industry earned over 347 million dollars worldwide. Which is a very huge number. But money doesn’t matter for millions of gamers. Though these 347 million dollars are for the game. But a gamer also needs to spend money on the storage. He or she has to, right?

Nowadays gamers are so big that, if you have 1TB storage on your system and you install 3-4 modern games then those games will take 50% of your storage. But why are games too big? Today, we’ll discuss about it. We’ll know why games are too big and if it can be solved by any chance. 

Games are too big?

If we keep an eye on the modern games then we’ll see that those modern games are so huge. They took up a lot of space in the storage. The size of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare is 144 GB, Microsoft Flight Simulator is 127 GB, Hitman 2 is 93 GB, GTA V is 72 GB and this list goes on. So modern games are taking a lot of storage. Buy what about the old games?

Old Games VS Modern Games

Old games weren’t that big. We are not going to much more old time. If we take a look at one of the famous games “GTA Vice City” then it takes only 2 GB storage on a system. On the other hand, if we talk about the upcoming game “GTA VI” then it’s going to take 150 GB of your storage if you want to play this game. 

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For “GTA Vice City”, nowadays 2 GB isn’t a big deal. But 150 GB is a big deal. Though in the old times, this 2 GB was a big deal. Maybe in the future 150 GB will not going to be a big deal. So, if we compare the old games with the modern games then it’s not going to be an even comparison. 

Why are games too big?

Now, let us talk about the main question. Why are games too big? There are two main reasons for that. One is for the textures and the second reason is Mipmap. We’ll talk about that now. We are going to know what are textures and what is mipmap. We’re also going to know why they are the reason for the large game size. 

Textures on a game

One of the reasons that games are too large nowadays is high-resolution textures. But what the hack is this texture? And why it’s important in this game. Can’t we just remove this thing to make the game less large? No, we can’t. But before knowing why, let’s know what textures are. 

What is Textures?

In an easy word texture is a technique to give realism to a game. Texturing is the key to adding images to the surfaces of objects in a game. That means textures mean wrapping multiple images to make an object that will identify as something present in our real life. 

Like if you see a car in a game, then it’s only a texture. With the help of the texturing technique, the car is created and that thing makes us feel that it’s a real car in the game. But why the game sizes are increasing day by day for textures? Are textures getting older or something else?

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Today we want games that are so much more realistic. We want games to become as realistic as our real world. And to do that we need high-resolution textures. So, to make high-resolution textures we need a larger texture size. If the resolution gets better then the size will increase. Like, if a 10 minutes video is 1 MB then a 1-hour video will be 100 MB. This means it will be larger than the 10-minute video for sure. For textures, the concept is also the same. If the resolution gets better then the size will also increase and for that, the size of a game will also increase. That is why today’s games are so big. 

Mipmap 

The other reason that makes a game size larger is mipmap or mipmapping. Mipmap is a computer graphic technique to improve rendering performance and rendering quality. 

The main thing that mipmap does is create multiple low-resolution forms of an image. To understand it properly just see the image below. 

Mipmap

Here suppose the first and the largest image resolution is 512 x 512. Now mipmap will create multiple forms of this image. Like 128 x 128, 64 x 64, 32 x 32, 16 x 16 and much more. So, the rendering quality will improve a lot. They understand the importance of mipmap, you can see the image below. 

Why do game developers not use compression techniques?

They do actually. A lot of time game developers use compression techniques to make the game size smaller. But, the main priority is the qualify for them. So, they don’t do anything which will decrease the quality of the game. 

Some compression techniques are:

• A8L8
• DXT
• 3Dc

There are also many more compression techniques. Though the main fact is game developers don’t use them if it decrease the quality of a game.

Conclusion

I hope now you know why games are so large nowadays. If you want to play a good game, that will make you feel that it’s happening in real life then the game should be larger. So, if you want to play games like GTA VI, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, FIFA 22, GTA V, and Red Dead Redemption 2 and games like those then you must have to have a large storage system in your system. 

Maybe 2 TB will be fine for that, but if you’re a game lover then the size needs to be much higher. 

Finally I want to thanks “arm Developer” for the Mipmap images.