Starfield download size is ten times bigger than Skyrim

pcgamesn.com:

Hey, you. You’re finally awake. Let me tell you a tale of videogame storage wars. From colossal, snow-capped mountains to verdant woodland and bustling towns, Skyrim’s 15 in-game square miles are crammed with quests, treasure, and places to explore. All that for a mere 12GB. A decade on from Skyrim’s release, Starfield wants to pick up where it left off. Swapping woods and mountains for nebulae and asteroid belts, Bethesda’s latest exploration-focused game clocks in at an enormous 125GB.

That’s a pretty hefty increase. But it’s not just Bethesda and Starfield culpable for ballooning storage requirements. The Star Wars Jedi Survivor system requirements, for example, stipulated a whopping 155GB spare space, a far cry from the now-modest Skyrim PC specs. It’s a clear industry trend: triple-A games getting bigger all the time.

What’s changed so much in a decade? Well, games are much more detailed, for a start. Nowadays, consumers expect a standard of graphics that requires dozens of gigabytes in environment assets, character models, and the rest. Also, huge, multi-terabyte drives are now accessible to your average gamer, so studios are less inclined to waste time and resources optimizing every last file to fit on your PC.

Studios and launchers could easily team up to let you choose which of a game’s files you want to download, though. If you’re not going to play multiplayer, you could just download the campaign, for example. Maybe you’re just looking to play in good old 1080p – does it really make sense to force you to download all the 4K texture packs?

But the vast majority of games don’t have that option. The cynic in me wonders if this excessive bloating’s intentional. The bigger the games are, the fewer you can fit on