i never understood this sole question: what is being downloaded when you download a game, and what makes each game however many gigabytes? Is it the 3d modeling of maps? The coding and game mechanics?
In: Technology
While u/Vixxay is right in that most things grew, they did so at extremely different rates. The actual size of compiled code for example is still below 200 MB for almost every game there is. For most games more like 50MB.
There are specific assest types responsible for the growth of game sizes, and that’s first and foremost textures and prerendered videos. They have doubled in resolution multiple times in the last thirty years. And every doubling in resolution means four times as much disk space. Textures in AAA games now take up at least 16 to 32 times the space than thirty years ago.
To a lesser degree the rest grew too, albeit a lot less drastically. Models have more polygons. Audio is maybe double the size than a decade ago.
But the *absolute* brunt of it is textures.
Audio is huge. The whole script is often in several languages.
Textures can be huge as well.
Prerendered video.
I think these 3 things are a large part.
It’s everything. I’m not trying to be smart. It’s just everything. Character models, maps, textures, game code. After you install the game you can go into your computers files and see everything that was downloaded.
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