I'm a bit confused about this. Of course, many would say that games are just getting bigger, but I think that's not 100% true. I mean a PS3 game consumes on average around the 4-5GB, but a PS4 game consumes on average around the 30-40GB. What the hell happened? Even if a game is ported from the PS3 to the PS4, it is at least 5 times as large on the PS4, although perhaps the textures and shadows are refreshed a little bit at most. But does that really need that much memory? I can't really believe that, but well, I'm not an expert either. I feel kind of old when I think that it seems like yesterday that I was able to save a good amount of games on the PS2 on a memory card that was 8MB in size and the rest of the game on the CD was at most 4GB in size, And now there are already games that take over 100GB of memory on the hard drive. That's completely crazy. Red Dead Redemption 2 simply takes over a fifth of my PS4 Hard Drive alone. Does that really have to be that much?
Well, so the memory cards from that time were purely purely for the scores. They do not need much storage today.
I would just say that the resolution and the much more detailed textures are the reason. On top of that, there was a lot of work to be done to make sure that games do not get too big to fit the blanks. This fear is no longer there today, since now huge amounts of data can be stored on the smallest data carriers.
High-resolution textures take up quite a bit of memory.
For example, Fallout 4 has a HD texture pack that is over 50GB in size and, as the name implies, contains mostly high-resolution textures.
Also video sequences are nowadays often already contained in a high resolution in the game files, these also take many times more memory than the same sequence in a lower resolution.
In addition, memory has become comparatively cheap compared to earlier. Accordingly, developers no longer have to try to conserve memory, even if one could do so in part.
It does not have to be that way, but the game developers just do not need to worry about storage. There are enough techniques to compress game data and textures, but if space does not matter then they are simply used in raw form.
I know that the memory cards were only responsible for the memory levels. I just loved to just pack a game and play. It's the point of a game console that you have fun with it. But nowadays, with the games completely copied to the console, it's not really that much fun to have the console run out of memory and you can only play a few games without having to erase anything, or even again to buy as much money as the game itself a new hard drive with more memory. With the resolution and the details you could be right, but in my opinion it is still exaggerated. But as I said I'm not an expert. But there were already games on the PS3, which might not have the same resolution, but at least as detailed graphics had as a PS4 game. If you look at, for example, Gran Turismo 6, Metal Gear Rising Revance or Fight Night Champion, then you realize that even today they look really damn good and are also very well stocked with content. In games like Gran Turismo, you can say it's just a racing game, of course it does not take much memory like a GTA, but first of all it does, and secondly there's now a Gran Turismo for PS4 and BAM almost ten times as big
I would really prefer if they took the time to compress all this a bit. But time is money and that's meanwhile, all it's about.
If the game then takes only 90 GB instead of 100 GB by optimizing the memory consumption, then it is so low in comparison that, as you said, the effort is not worth it.
