Maybe in 10 years this won’t seem like such a big deal, but today it’s almost hard to believe — PS4 shooter Killzone: Shadow Fall will be close to a 50GB download, according to a Sony exec.
Speaking with Eurogamer about the benefits of the next PlayStation’s “play while you download!” feature, Sony UK’s Fergal Gara dropped the bomb in an interview published this morning:
“The Play as you Download functionality, for example, means you don’t need the whole file before you go,” Gara said. “This is a little bit counterbalanced by the fact the files themselves are getting bloody big. Killzone: Shadow Fall is an uber file – I think it’s cracking on for 50GB. It looks it, too, when you see it.”
50 gigabytes! For context, most of the PC’s biggest games are closer to 20-30GB.
The PS4’s built-in hard-drive is 500GB, although not all of that will be accessible for the games and media you download. You can attach an external hard-drive for additional storage, yes, but still! 50 gigabytes! If the future of gaming is digital, the ever-increasing size of games is going to be something to watch carefully over the next few years.
The Wii U’s hard-drive, by the way, is 32GB. Just throwing that out there.
Comments
37 responses to “Just One PS4 Launch Game Could Be A Whopping 50 Gigabytes”
Yikes. I remember the days of games on floppy disks. Then came the days of games on multiple floppy disks. Those were huge games.
This would take 35,556 floppy disks!
Yeah… I had Indiana Jones & The Fate Of Atlantis on the Amiga. That was on 11 floppy discs, and I didn’t have a hard drive so I had to just keep swapping them around.
I can remember my brother getting Wing Commander 2 for his birthday and it was huge. Took him half a day of disk swapping just to install the thing haha.
I had two extra external drives on the amiga….mainly to play this co-op game called moonstone
I had 1 external drive in addition to the internal one – that was the only thing that made Fate of Atlantis even remotely playable.
Oh man, I LOVED Moonstone 😀 So freakin’ violent 😀
Hell yeah, i was only young when i played it and we used to hot seat it with three other mates…..it was awesome, i would love to see a remake…..another amiga game i loved was dragons breath….loved designing peped up machines of death 😀
Moonstone was awesome! I had a whopping 40 meg HD on my A1200. So much luxury!
Oh man, I loved Moonstone.
Kill Dragon, get the Sword of Sharpness, win.
All the more reason for me to stick with discs.
See this is why my 6bm download speed is good enough. (actual speed around 800k on a good day)
NBN who needs it.
I am so pissed about the NBN, it was due to be completed on my street by December, and now it is in limbo. I get around 200k on my ADSL2+ connection. It would only take me, what, about 3 days @ 24hrs a day to download one game, assuming I do nothing else on the net. Sweet.
This is exactly why I buy my games on disc (except for indie games). If I downloaded Killzone: Shadowfall I would have no internet for the whole month, because my download quota is 50GB.
Same here: we had to go for cable broadband (with its tiny download quotas) at our house because our distance from the telephone exchange means that ADSL2+ would be not much faster than dial-up.
*sigh* Why can’t we have a proper NBN?
Difficult to imagine, the textures must be huge or the disc is full of uncompressed video. The data can’t have been optimised well.
Apparently Killzone 3 was something like 41Gb in size, and obviously Shadowfall would have higher resolution textures etc. Although that 41Gb is probably a bit inflated since it was on BluRay where some games have the same data in multiple locations on the disc to improve load times (I assume that’s what KZ3 did, since I don’t think it required any mandatory install at all). But even so, 50Gb for KZ4 doesn’t seem beyond the realms of feasibility – Guerilla make very nice looking games, and that tends to come at a cost in terms of size.
Agreed. Considering the highest native resolution of PS4 is 1080p, I don’t quite see how this is optimised. PC games have a max single-monitor resolution of 2560×1600, and yet files are ~30GB or smaller.
Perhaps they’re deliberately using a data structure optimized for speed over size? If they have 50GB to work with I don’t see why they wouldn’t try to use it.
damn, i was hoping to go digital for Next Gen, that wont be happening, unless Sony allows 1tb and 2tb HDD to work
Lucky for us here in Australia, we are future-proofing and preparing for the rapidly increasing bandwidth appetite of all media applications with FTTH. Oh, wait, we canned that idea didn’t we….
But we stopped the boats!
Oh wait…
That awkward moment NBN calls me to “Upgrade” my 115mbps Cable 3.0 connection to a flash new FTTN 30Mbps connection… Thanks Malcolm, you deserve a slap on the back of the head…
Goodbye data quota. It was nice knowing you.
From memory, I think God Of War 3 was 52GB on the PS3
Just goes to show how hilarious it was for Microsoft to want to force users with a full disc install for the insane digital future they originally had planned.
Jesus with the amount of games i have right now (after trading in over 30 after e3 for pre order deal) I would still be needing a 10 TB HDD were they from next gen.
Its also laughable because about 99% of Aussies can’t even download this kind of file. Shit I have the best speed available to me and it would take me 44 hours of continuous download completely and utterly 100% uninterrupted. No browsing, no youtube no one in my whole house can use the internet for 2 whole days (can’t even sign into xbox live). If they did my speed drops by about 60% or more turning this into something akin to 3 entire days, not to mention the download caps I have.
This is why I wont be downloading anything i can purchase on disc unless i’m saving over double the $$ per GB used on a new HDD. (say 2TB WD HDD for $150+10 shipping, roughly 8 cents per GB) Makes a 50Gb download cost roughly $4 in HDD space (If you buy a smaller drive will cost even more). So If the digital isn’t at least $10 cheaper than any version i can import its actually going to cost me more in HDD and internet costs.
Given everything is region free you can get every brand new title for 50-62 straight from us (with free shipping from Play Asia) and sometimes even less from the UK. Given the horrible prices of online content here in Australia, the enormous size of AAA games will make the digital copy many times more expensive than any imported physical copy, which is the biggest joke of all to be honest.
Installation is mandatory for both the PS4 and Xbox One. At least with the PS4 you can swap out the internal hard drive. Only external drives for the Xbox One.
Well yes and no, it still “Requires” an install, what that means exactly is the part that hasn’t been expressly explained.
My point was more akin to previously, the ENTIRE disc had to be installed regardless of what was actually required for the game to run. There was no half measures. Now at least, ( i would assume) there is the option for basically what we have now with GTA V, partial installs.
If every knob head goes around (or if Microsoft actually forces it) having us install the entire disc to HDD for 0 benefit, i’m going to be beyond pissed.
This, combined with the fact it will be cheaper on bluray, is why digital purchasing just isn’t really a viable option yet.
I guess with our lord Tony providing us with a second rate broadband network, there’s unlikely to be any big investment into Australian developers any time soon
So how will cloud gaming help with this?
Isn’t 50Gb the capacity of a dual-layer BluRay disc? Are they already stretching the capacity of the storage medium in a launch title? I wonder what the implications are for 2 or 3 years down the line as games get bigger, more ambitious, etc. Are we going to be seeing multi-disc / mandatory installs etc?
Oooh yeah! Bring out a laser disc console!!
This should be of no surprise, many PS3 exclusives were nearly hitting the limit of a Blu-Ray disc.
Killzone 3, God of War III, Uncharted 3 (48.2GB), Gran Tourismo 5, God of War Ascension.
It was only because of xbox’s problem of being on DVD that many games stayed under 7GB for consoles.
This is also why I will be swapping out my PS4s 500GB drive for a 1TB on day one.
Hopefully those damn screws will be easier to undo than the PS3 ones >:(
hopefully in a few years there will be PS4s shipping with 3-4TB HDDs. Storage wont be so much of a problem as download times.
this is one reason why i will not go digital
50gb is not that big, PS4 games will end up being way bigger than that – uncharted 3 digital download is 50gb so this is no surprise to me
Most of that is Video for cutscenes rendered with the games engine with low compression. The PS3’s top titles all do it to allow a seamless experience.