the physical video games are dying the future will be completely digital - Ultimate Guide

A lot had not been born at the time, but I can remember when we could store a video game on a diskette of just 1.44 MB capacity, 1.44 MB of capacity, that, if we compare it for example with the 155 GB of the Ultra version of Final Fantasy XV, iti's a brutally big increase.

But this format quickly fell short when the 700 MB included in the first PlayStation CDs won the game to 64 MB of Nintendo 64 cartridges, so the jump from cartridges to CDs.

 All the standards had been broken in a fairly short amount of time.

But it didn't take long either when the 700 MB of the CD was crushed greatly by the 4.7 GB of the DVD, which were also crushed by the 25 GB Blu-ray, improving more and more the resolution, sound, speed, languages ​​and more, all in one disc. Everything that was necessary to create the most incredible game that could be in the market, sometimes some developers came to throw more than 1 disc for the same game when the caps flew away and the title did not fit completely in only one .

But when the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One hit the market, the super resolutions, the mega surround sound that could make you feel almost live, the high-capacity discs, the installation of console games and the Internet downloads and seated, they made an even bigger jump, enormous in fact.

The multiplayer Titanfall without campaign arrived, taking advantage of the boom of the cloud had at that time, but they were 48 GB of installation which had to support the users who wanted to take it. Of those 48 GB of Titanfall, just over 35 GB were audio files.

The problem came with the PC users, they could not decompress the files of the game with the rhythm that was necessary, this had caused a huge slowness in a process that could not be paused.

To all this, we must add the increasing success of the resolutions and the commotion they were causing, the 4K was in the house and users were dying to have it.

If we compare the resolution 1,280 x 1,280 pixels which fit in only 4 MB, with the 64 MB occupying 4,096 x 2,160 pixels in sizes that the 4K has, it's a much higher amount of space and although at 64 MB it may seem very little, it continues to somando to the total size.

And by its port any art director, especially if it's not technical, will want its objects, settings and characters to look their best.

But usually this goal ends up becoming a problem when the project is almost finished, that someone takes to check how big the project is at that point.

Clearly if the developers want to make their titles a success in the market thanks to their sales and their excellent work is something that they necessarily have to accept. In the same way it happens with the users, if they really want to have an almost face-to-face experience they have to put up with it and pay the price for it. Such is the case of the racing video game developed by Turn 10 Studios and distributed by Microsoft, "Forza Motorsport" that with its nothing enviable 95 GB disk size, in which developers should study and work the impact of the installation without losing quality along the way, which inevitably leads to compress a good part of the content, but not as much as our hard drives would like.

But this does not have airs to finish, better resolutions, a much more forceful sound and more, in addition to the growth in the gaming hardware industry will continue to increase the size of future titles.

But there are several aspects that can help to diminish more and more the impact on the final size of titles, but that is something that depends and is in the hands of the developers themselves.

A videogame can start weighing a certain amount of space at the time we acquired it, but this does not necessarily mean that then the title will always die weighing the same, this can really affect users of mobile devices that have a amount of space certainly limited in their devices. Updates, corrections, personalized installations, are aspects that can saturate the space quite quickly and without many times getting to imagine it.

 Developers should allow users to choose what they really want to download, not necessarily everything that developers ask us to download after the initial installation of a title, it is really useful for us after all. For example, if we only want to download the multiplayer, or if we only want to download a specific package, why am I going to download all the others when I really do not want them all? Why download all the language files when I'm really only going to use one of them, for what I want to have higher resolutions if maybe my PC, device or screen can not support them more than just the minimum or data miners that find hidden assets in the game code that does not actually appear anywhere, there are ways to solve the problem of the size of video games, what there is no willingness of developers to help users with this problem.

The increase in size has gone out of everyone's hands, clearly we have to be aware that in some cases it's simply inevitable, but in others there is a solution.

Do not be surprised that in a few years a video game can even exceed 1 TB in size on disk. That is the dominant trend at this time, in green the increase in the size of the new titles is maintained, either by updates, additional content, etc., even in the next titles to be released.

Such is the case of "Gears of War 4" for the Xbox One X, which leaves the game in more than 100 GB, but as we mentioned, this is often inevitable, to deliver a good result simply requires space.

But the streaming could end this problem, however, it would not be free from others that would be generated (hello, I play in the cloud to 4K that you are going to leave me without data), and this without taking into account that we are getting closer to the 8K era.

Really this is something that seems never to end, if on the one hand we cover a hole, on the other we get a new leak of water and so we continue.