How can a huge game like Skyrim fit on a CD and be played on a console, while only a few episodes of a TV show can fit on a DVD?

Question

I know that there are two different machines used to read the disks, but does that make a difference in how much a single disk can hold?

Is the difference in the way the disks are read or the type of data they hold?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Skyrim came on a DVD, not a CD. So in both cases it’s the same amount of storage.

A game like Skyrim is made up of lots of repeated data. There are loads of dungeons in it but if you look around the dungeons are mostly made up of the same models and textures repeated lots of times. So it doesn’t need unique copies of that data for every single place it appears in the game (although it may be duplicated a few times for performance reasons).

You can’t do that with video. Video is compressed in various ways, including only storing the changes from one frame to the next instead of the whole thing. So In a way it can also reuse data to some extent.

But if one episode of a show reuses a set from a previous episode there’s no way to reuse the same bit of data for both episodes. We can easily tell it’s the same scenery, but as far as the DVD player is concerned it’s completely separate. It has no knowledge of what’s in the scene, it’s just looking at pixel values.