It’s been over six years since I shared with you an article explaining why games are taking up more and more space. The aforementioned article has aged quite well, although we must add another important detail, namely usage duplicate assets reduce the impact hard drives have on access and load times, a burden we still carry today.

What we generally know as assets are nothing but the game files and data that are installed on the storage drive and that are necessary for its operation. One HDD storage unit can access data and files located in different locations on the same platteror they may even end up separately on different packages, resulting in extremely long seek times and very heavy load times.

Duplicating these data sources in different areas of the disk helps these types of drives speed up the search and access process, but of course this means that we end up taking up more space with data and files that are actually unnecessary. SSDs don’t have this problem, but as we know they co-exist with hard drives, and after all, previous generation consoles still have a huge user base and therefore continue to be the basis for many games to be developed.

The fact is that in 2017 we started to be surprised to see that some games had already crossed the 70 GB mark and the development we experienced was clear. We can say that consumption between 90 and 130 GB of space in games has been normalized, and some, like Call of Duty Modern Warfare, have reached the 200GB mark, a true madness that has forced many fans of the franchise to upgrade their equipment and add a new storage unit.

Looking at triple A’s latest release, we realize this there is a very clear trend to exceed 100 GB. For example, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor requires 155 GB of free PC space, while Forspoken uses 150 GB, and both RedFall and The Last of Us Part I require 100 GB of free space. Diablo IV is not far behind, as we will need 90 GB of free space to move the new Blizzard, and another of the most anticipated games, Baldur’s Gate 3, could use up to 150 GB of space.

Faced with this trend, it is clear that if we have a very small storage unit, we are left with nothing but buy more capacity. Fortunately, prices have dropped a lot and we can buy 1 TB SSD storage units from just 50.99 euros.

But we can too resort to cloud gaming, because it will allow us to play new generation titles without having to install them on our PC, and there are completely free modalities that work quite well. Deleting games to free up space and not have titles installed that we won’t play anymore is another solution, but we have to be careful with read and write cyclesas these can ultimately significantly reduce the life of the SSD if they are very high and occur for very short periods of time.