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

Video games use text based code which is relatively small that references 3D models, textures, music and sounds that can be repeated thousands of times in the span of a game but only exist in one instance on the disc. A DVD uses about 30 individual pictures for every second of video and the sounds file is one giant movie-long piece of data. Nothing is repeated or reused.