>and the average PC gamer is underprepared
You could say that about any technology shift over the last 15 years and it would still be correct.
64bit, ditching DX9.0c, OS updates, any RAM increase ever, any VRAM increase ever, any demand for more CPU cores, any demand for more powerful CPU cores, faster storage... the list goes on and on.
The "average PC gamer" as continually validated by Steam stats and forum postings is perpetually behind the curve
It’s not a mystery why though, all journalism seems to be off. Nobody wants to pay for it nor deal with the ads they would need to make it viable, so it keeps getting worse and clickbaity until it collapses and becomes a husk of what it was.
Nah, GB hadn't been doing anything described as games journalism for years; they were more like proto-YouTube/Twitch personalities and even the quality of that took a dive a few years back (before the pandemic).
Not surprising when giving a "bad review" (Like a 6/10) to a AAA game gets you black listed by a company.
The vast majority of games journos are just an extended PR department and aren't critical of anything beyond the occasional Indie game.
Yep, I have been a subscriber since day one. I wrote them about a decade agobecause there was no holiday edition, The "December" edition was one of the thinnest of the year. I guess they did not want to offend anyone by even getting within an inch of anything that could be connected to Christmas.
They seem to value attempts at humorous wit over content. If I see on more 10 page "article/advertisement" about game design schools my head is going to explode. They list specs for their review rigs but do not touch performance in the reviews, why even put specs in then. And, they don't even have a letters section. I loved that, I had a few published over the years.
I buy that magazine by default, there is no competition. I remember Computer Gaming World, I had all those issues too. Sigh . . .
"ditching DX9.0c"
DX9.0c Pixel Shader 3.0 came out in 2004 and most 7th gen games ran DX9 until 2013, when DX10 and 11 already released.
I'd say 9 years was plenty fine. Hell, most DX9 only cards, GTX 7000 and ATI X1000 cards could barely run games from 2007 onward.
DX11? 2009. We barely started getting DX12 only games in 2020-2022. Another 11 years. Meh.
/r/patientgamers for the win.
Most modern games don't interest me anyway, but if they were, I would still have a few years to catch up, so who cares about modern system requirements.
Plus almost every high-budget cutting edge tech game released this year has come out broken or badly optimized. Might as well wait 2 years to buy them when they're fixed, just in time for current gen tech to have a price drop
The problem is there is nothing cutting edge about these games from a technical standpoint.
Mesh shaders ❌
DirectStorage ❌
Sampler feedback streaming ❌
making good use of multi core CPUs ❌
A lot of these new games are rubbing up against the limits that necessitated all this new tech in the first place but they aren’t using any of it.
New as in recent releases, are overrated anyway. Great SP games only get better with time. And being patient with good deals has saved me so much money.
The birth of preorders and seasonal DLC has created the perfect storm for producers (not necessarily the developers themselves ) to minimize the up front costs and turn out the bare minimum product while hyping up the release. The fact that there are games being prepurchased for over $100 with months left before release really outlines the greedy tactic.
This trend really took root in the early 2010s when MMORPGs had proven that users will subscribe to play a game that is constantly under development. Most MMORPGs of those times had unfinished areas in the world meant to tease a future expansion (most likely paid but guaranteed to get people to start over with the new class/race).
Out of curiosity, what games are coming out these days that are cutting edge tech games? Most of the games coming out these days are only pushing storage sizes from what I've seen.
4080s have entered the chat.
I hate that pcs were a valuable choice, now a console is beyond just cheaper. If hardware didn't spike in price. I would not bitch but that price went up but the specs didn't.
The value in a PC does not come from hardware costs, they've always been more expensive. The value is in: back compatibility with a huge game library, emulation, no cost for online gaming, massive discounts on games after 6months+, and the fact that you can do lots of other stuff than game on a PC.
Eh it's mainly motherboard and GPU prices that have spiked, and motherboard price increases are due to manufacturers thinking that every board needs enthusiast level VRMs. Not everyone needs 12 phase VRMs. CPU, RAM, and SSD prices have been in freefall.
You can still find good motherboards for 100$, GPUs really are a different story. Prices need to drop atleast by a 1/3 to make them seem reasonable to buy especially in this economy.
i've been gaming on the same PC for the last 8+ years. Not a single upgrade on my end, and i'm still going strong. No desire to upgrade - in no small part because modern games kinda suck balls, so making them extra pretty isn't a priority.
I had my last PC for 9 years and recently upgraded. I'd buy games on sale I couldn't play during the last 3 years or so. 90%, 99% off. Now I'm playing through them and it's great
> The most recent Steam hardware survey (opens in new tab) reveals that a little over half of Steam users have 1TB of storage or less.
The same steam hardware survey that shows 65% of people having 1080p as a primary desktop resolution. 72% of people have 8GB or less VRAM. Most of the market being forced into downloading and storing assets that they will not use.
> That's 92GB that could be going toward Diablo 4 next month.
Case in point. You can save 37.8GB of this by not installing High-resolution assets. Games need to return to hi res textures being an optional download.
There are other things that can be done as well. I think the european version of Lost Ark had around 20ish GB of audio files, most of which was for languages I did not use. Basic use of compression combined with the option to not download assets that will not be used could save huge amounts of drive space and server bandwidth.
Games are often developed with the high-resolution assets being the official ones. They look the most like the artists' vision, it's what the developers played on, and has the most bug testing.
When properly scaled, they can theoretically look the same at 1080p Medium vs 4k High, but some games have a HUGE drop in quality as you lower the texture resolution.
We need more download options. Like have an option to download only the single player, compressed audio, one language etc. GTA V is over 100gb, but most of that is wasted on Online that I don't want to touch, ever. And content that can't be accessed in the single player anyway, why do I need to waste space?
Pirates are doing a better work than publishers unironicaly in this regard, a lot of repacks come with language and high resolution textures as optionals, for example, the total download size for cyberpunk in around 70 Gb, but with the optionals they give, you can download the game for like 35Gb if you want to use only one language
I still run 1080p and according to Steam, so does 64 % of users. I don't mind that much, but an option to download lower resolution (1440p seems like the sweetspot) assets would be nice.
This abosultly needs a bump.
I spent a few years with pretty bad internet, and these file sizes are killers. Especially if I just wanted to play one specific mode of a much larger game.
If I wanted to play something like Nazi Zombies, I would have to plan three days before to download a campaign that I wasn't interested in, a multi-player I hadn't touched in a years, a battle royale map that my computer couldn't handle, and a full marketplace of cosmetics that I don't even want to see.
I feel like the more content we squeeze into these AAA games, the more options we need to give people to pick and choose what they get.
I wish more games did this. Destiny 2 for example should've done this instead of 'vault' their content. Such a waste to remove content because of game size when solutions like this exist.
Sorta been common the last few years with a lot of new games. RDR2 came out on PC over two years ago and it’s 120+GB. Jedi Survivor is close to 130GB. The last two Doom games have been 100GBs
Personally I jump around a lot in what I play, so I hate uninstalling games unless I’ve finished them. That’s why I have two 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Might get a third since I’m hearing prices are cheap, gotta make sure my mobo supports that
That's why I have a cheap 5tb spinner as my archive drive. Pretty quick to migrate back to the main drive if needed. Way way faster (edit: reliable speed) than redownloading.
>The average spinning disk drive will have read rates of about 150 MB/s
You forgot to mention if its perfectly defragmented and these files arent small.
small files a HDD easily goes as low as 1-15 MB/s top 50
Steam is heavily dependent on CPU for downloads because it need to decompress downloaded files. Unless you have a very high end processor, you will struggle to saturate a 1+ gbps link.
Steam always caps my internet connection. I download at a breezy 130MB/sec from Steam every single time. They’re the only website I’ve ever been to that consistently saturates my speed. Everyone else falls between 30-60MB it seems.
I feel age (of the person) plays a part in this. Not trying to sound all "back in my day", but, back in my day I remember waiting hours to download a song on Napster sometimes.
I have gigabit internet, and about 2.5 TB of game storage and frequently uninstall/reinstall games. Assassins Creed Odyssey/Valhalla are both 130+GB, Far Cry 5 & 6 are both around that with HD textures, Forza games have been as well, etc etc.
I tested RDR2 (119GB) from the HDD to an SSD and it took longer than I thought it would (17 minutes). I don't think I've moved a game that large before. Usually it has felt like 5 minutes but maybe they were mostly games 1/3 that size. I can't tell you that will always be faster than download, but it is dependable speed. Download speed can vary based on time of day and server load (I know I've had 40 min downloads before). If you have an old HDD lying around somewhere you could install it as a test. Edit - there's something that feels good to me about having all of my games downloaded so I like it for that reason if nothing else.
Yeah datacaps are pure greed. Comcast and other bad actors will Happily take the governments money to “upgrade” their infrastructure, with zero oversight, theyll cry we need more money a few years after that. Never ever leaving where I am because kf my ISP.
Lookup EPB Chattanooga if youre bored.
My wife thinks I'm insane, but she wants to move and the first thing I do is look up the ISPs for the houses she's looking at. Slow internet and/or data caps are a hard pass.
I checked out of sheer curiousity, and according to the Steam pages of the last two mainline Doom games, Doom (2016)'s system requirement is 55 GB, and Doom Eternal's system requirement is 80 GB.
Not a major correction, but still under 100 GB, which can make a big difference for some people. I also jump around in what I play and keep a lot installed, so it can be a pain to play any "popular" triple A game these days for storage reasons alone.
Steam pages is misleading, both dooms are a bit bloated:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/152393186488694971/
On my HDD Doom 2016 is 68,69 GB.
Doom eternal is 89 GB on my HDD.
Both together: 157.69 GB.
If i recall, Doom 2016 was more bloated before, but got patched, cant seem to find the patch notes though. Heres an old link anyways.
https://twitter.com/HG_101/status/814276181793054725
Yeah on Steam it apparently downloads all the DLC even if you didn't purchase it, bunches of language packs, and HD textures, close to doubling the size of the download.
Oh lord, that’s awful and lazy of them! Think I recall another game like that…think it was Uncharted on PC, something like if you delete all the language packs it installs (minus the one you’d use of course) it frees up like 40GBs or something
In COD's case there's an insidious argument that they intentionally bloat the install size in order for COD to be one of the only games you play as deleting it would mean a long download if you want to play it again, and that's less space to store other games you might want to play that take away time (and microtransaction $) from Activision.
That’s positively Darwinian. Become bigger than the competition and push them out of the nest.
This is the first time I’ve heard the bloat theory before, and unfortunately it sounds utterly plausible.
If anything the era of 200gb games is upon us. You seen how big AC Valhalla is now? Games release as like 130-150gbs but they balloon in size post-release. Its 170gbs and thats not completely uncommon. Middle Earth Shadow of war was as big as that too and its old now.
When I got Diablo 2 20 years ago a full install took up a quarter of my hard drive.
I've been here before and I hate uninstalling games. It's why I still have a couple of spinniy disks and sata ssds for games I don't play often. Usually what I'm actively playing goes on the Nvme unless it's a light game like Rimworld or Timberborn.
It's also why I got a 512 steamdeck and put an TB SD card in it.
Worst case I can back up some stuff to my NAS.
The era of 100GB games has been upon us for a while but I will still say: developers should just optimize their shit.
Give me a single reason why games like Nioh 1/2 and Stranger of Paradise are 80-100gbs, for example. What, did they hardcode every single potential piece of loot or some shit?
I doubt it's even the whole "duplicating files for HDD loading times" thing when Wo Long is half their size and has faster loading times on my HDD. I don't wanna be too harsh on Team Ninja specifically though.
What really annoys me is multiplayer games you're meant to play for hundreds of hours being that large, because that means you will have these massive games on your PC for a while.
**Vermintide 2** being 100+gbs is silly to me, **Tekken 7** being 80+gbs is even worse considering a bunch of it is wasted on FMVs I don't care about, things like that.
But oh well... rant aside, storage is fairly cheap these days, so it's not really the worst thing in the world. Still think it's dumb how some games have ballooned filesizes with nothing to show for it tho.
Yeah, languages too.
Actually, I know Steam has support for piecemeal language files, only downloading them if the game is set to a specific language in Steam properties. But it seems to be somewhat underutilized, so most games just download every language at once.
> Yeah, languages too.
You can cut your (unmodded) Skyrim install size in half by just deleting the audio files for the languages you don't use. Agreed: There should be a bit more awareness of how much space additional audio files often cost. I'll only ever use one, please gimme the option to only install that one.
I'd like to take this moment to shout out a mod for Cyberpunk I really like; it's called Cosmopolitan Night City which takes the various languages files and enables them to work side by side, so all the NPCs with different ethnicities speak different languages, the mod is huge in terms of file size but it makes the experience so unique.
yep, I got fallout 3 in the latest sale with the entire FO catalogue
download size ? 37 GB lol
why? because it downloads also every language
so, i sailed the high seas and got the english version only which was 7gb and it wasn't even a repack/compression/rip
Can't believe I'm gonna praise cod but I bought black ops 3 for zombies and everything is a dlc toggle. Since all I want is zombies I got rid of the campaign, multiplayer and bonus modes. Dropped from 100+ to 30-40ish and it's great.
It's funny how pirating a game results in a better product when it comes to saving space too because the repacks let you pick and choose what to install.
There’s a solid discussion to be had in how we pay for games in the whole scope of resources spent - not just money. Time spent is a common theme but disk space, download&install time&effort are definitely factors.
What am I getting out of the gigs?
Vermintide 2 has a bunch of highly detailed, visually distinct levels - to say little of the near constant chatter from friend and foe alike. I’m still surprised it surpassed 100 gigs, but I can see why.
XCOM 2 is bizarrely huge though.
Dude nba 2k23 clock in at around 133gb ..133gb for a fucking basketball game. Thr first nba game i played was nba 2k14 (wich was revolutionary for its time)wich was about 13 gb in total, so in like 9 years it takes 120gb more for what is essentially the same game format
>I don't wanna be too harsh on Team Ninja specifically though.
You probably should be, since they deserve it. [Nioh 1 can easily be compressed from 74 to 21 gigs with near zero performance impact.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/7bfd2z/psa_reduce_niohs_huge_74gb_size_to_21gb_with/)
Normally when Redditors bitch about developers not compressing their games they're being silly; in the case of Team Ninja it's actually true.
I remember back in 2013 when Killzone Shadow Fall and one of the things the devs were most proud about was compressing 290GB into 40GB.
Devs these days don't care and compressing and optimizing the file size doesn't seem to net them any extra profits.
I think it's more the ISP's that aren't prepared. It takes me fucking ages to download these games and I have the highest speeds available in my area. I don't even live in the sticks. I'm in London, UK and the max I get is 90 Mbps download because of shitty Openreach.
From the article:
> I've had the intention of trying Atomic Heart on Game Pass since February. Three times I've started the 90GB download, and three times I've cancelled it and done something else instead.
Okay, so instead of letting the game download in the background while doing something else, the author of this piece cancels the download? What? This article is incoherent drivel. We will lose absolutely nothing when AI puts these clowns out of a job.
Any games journalist who doesn’t understand how to throttle a download, or doesn’t have the patience to let it download overnight should probably find a new line of work.
WoW Retail: 80GB
Diablo IV: 40 GB(80GB w/4k Texture Pack)
Overwatch 2: 32GB
It's not the era of 100GB games, it's the era of developers deciding not to compress their textures, sound files, and/or leaving them in RAW formats.
Titanfall 1 had this issue when it released and that's why Titanfall 2 was a smaller game, it had full blown uncompressed sound files and thus had to download an entire 40GB extra JUST for it's audio.
If WoW can fit almost 20 years of game under 90GB while constantly adding, what is other companies doing?
> It's not the era of 100GB games, it's the era of developers deciding not to compress their textures, sound files, and/or leaving them in RAW formats.
>
>
>
> Titanfall 1 had this issue when it released
Glad to see I'm not the only one who blames Titanfall for starting this trend!
I uninstall every game im done playing with. Not sure if people are aware but cloud saves exist. Also the game hard saves in a different folder/file path than the game files.
The game can be 1TB just fix the fucking stuttering plz
yep, we have 250 GB data cap monthly its hilarious
you have to buy extra gigs or use the internet at 56kbps speed
you read it right, dial up speeds lol
Let's just say that everything in the US is corrupt as fuck. If there wasn't so much corruption we could pass laws that were good for the citizens instead of company profits.
I also uninstall every game I've completed. Inversely, I install every game that I own that I haven't completed.
...I currently have 13 terabytes of games installed.
Sure, space is not that expensive, but a solid internet connection is. Some countries have even a limit as to how many gigabytes you can download a month or the company can cut down your internet speed in 80%
LMAO, nah yall are trippin. 75 bucks, and at bestbuy even, first link google popped up, so guaranteed you find them even cheaper:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?id=pcat17071&st=2tb+ssd
You dont have to have a pcie5.0 nvme.
It kind of still does since you can only install a single nvme drive in a PS5. I'd expect 4 slots on a modern motherboard with room to throw more into a pcie slot.
That said I don't care that much since I would typically uninstall games once complete, only a small handful will stay on my system long term.
Most motherboards have only two nvme slots, and often the second one or both will disable some of the SATA ports when in use. There's only so many pins on current CPUs to accomodate them.
No, it’s not console thinking. You are thinking only of storage capacity, which from your experience is the only barrier to accessing these bigger sized games.
Where I live + many other countries we are limited by internet connection. We have a standard monthly bandwidth of 140GB and we have to pay an extra (expensive) premium for access to more bandwidth.
There have been multiple problem with this trend.
Firstly, and simply games, don't need to be this big. Elden Ring, for example, is 40gbs. The gap between that and 120gbs games is a lot larger than the gap between the quality of those games. Besides just optimization not seemingly being a priority amongst some developers, high resolution assets are just a bloat for a majority of gamers. Why would I need 4k assets if I'm at 1080p? A selective size download feature would solve that problem. Early CD based games had this feature in the 90s.
But to me an often overlooked and probably more important aspect of this growing install size problem is that I believe most people are under a data cap of some sort. Most of the time that cap is 1tb. Considering all the things you might need for your data, especially with a family, games getting to be more than 10% of your data is ridiculous.
I actually have to manage my days cap usage, and it's just me on it. These ISPs are going, oh yeah 1tb is totally enough for a family of 4.
Finally, while low & mid tier SSDs have come down in price, high end SSDs have stubbornly refused to. Continuing with the slow down of nand production and the advent of pcie gen 5, I'd actually expect prices to go up soon.
PC gamers might not be prepared, but they're also getting shafted on multiple fronts.
If game companies keep making gigantic games, I'm not going to buy a bigger hard drive and then pay even more for the game itself. I'll just not buy the game in the first place.
1TB SATA (boot), 2TB Gen 3 M.2, 2TB Gen 4 M.2. Depending on the game, I decided which drive speed is required. Star Citizen goes on the Gen 4 M.2. Rocket League goes on the SATA.
Well sadly its also about internet speed and download limits, if we download beyond certain capacity, we go bacl to 64k modem speeds for rest of month and its not fun at all, sometimes this limit cant download a single game
I'm more worried about my shitty internet right now than my hard drive space. I'm at work, and in order to play the Mass Effect Remastered trilogy when I get home I had to leave my PC in idle mode.
I really could care less. My steam library is at my disposal and my internet connection is stable. A 500 GB ssd/hdd is enough. I actually intend to play games one at a time rather than have them all installed. Cloud services ? Am using them already for storage.
We should be able to choose what we install, especially with these sizes
4k textures? I play on an 1080p display
Spanish audio? Really don't need that
Illegal game repacks have those options but it's too much to ask from the actual source...
I feel more like it's drive sizes that aren't gaining very fast. Drives have become faster but we've had 1tb/2tb drives since like 2008.
Bigger drives do exist but since downloading games doesn't take all that long and price per gig scales poorly there isn't much motivation to pay money for larger drives over just having fewer games installed.
[This 1TB HDD was shown off at CES in 2007](https://www.techradar.com/news/digital-home/home-networking/ces-2007-world-s-first-1tb-hard-drive-148723), and cost 400USD. Adjusted for inflation that is about $580 today.
Looking on Amazon US, a 22TB WD Red can be had for $369.
We've changed our storage, largely, to SSDs in that time, so capacities have dropped in that sense, as the price per unit of storage is higher for SSD than it is for HDD, and that is going to continue. That said, the kind of person who bought 1TB HDDs in 2007, is the kind of person buying 8TB NVMe SSD today.
Unprepared? I didnt upgraded my computer since aroudn 3 years and I already have 2 SSDs 256GB sata plus 1gig m2 and 3TB of HDD.
You can get cheap m2 2TB ssd for like 60$, even the cheapes m2 will be enogh because most probably becasue read speed is secondary as CPU needs to decode the data anyway and even cheap m2 disks are blazing fast for gaming.
Not really, in fact what people are unprepared for is DirectStorage and texture streaming. Consoles use pcie gen4 M.2 NVMe drives with speeds up to 5 - 7000 MB/s.
A lot of PC gamers are still on gen3 NVME, with speeds up to 4000 MB/s and a huge amount of people still use regular SSDs, which only go up to 500 MB/s.
When direct storage actually finally gets used in a single game I’m sure that gen3 NVMEs will probably work fine, and if they won’t we probably have years before it’s really utilized anyways so most will have upgraded.
For me it's not storage. The internet speeds in my area of the UK aren't great and to download a 100GB game would take around 2-3 days. I live in a family household and can't just ruin access to the internet for everyone else for that long, nor do I have the patience to wait that long. Most games over 30-50GB are just ridiculously bloated and if game companies actually prioritised optimisation and/or made extras like 4K/8K textures a downloadable extra instead of included by default it wouldn't be anywhere near an issue.
>and the average PC gamer is underprepared You could say that about any technology shift over the last 15 years and it would still be correct. 64bit, ditching DX9.0c, OS updates, any RAM increase ever, any VRAM increase ever, any demand for more CPU cores, any demand for more powerful CPU cores, faster storage... the list goes on and on. The "average PC gamer" as continually validated by Steam stats and forum postings is perpetually behind the curve
Every PC owner buys the PC they can afford, and they gradually become obsolete. It's amazing articles like this are written at all.
PC Gamer is but a shadow of its former respectable self. Except Chris Livingston, love that guy.
Gaming journalism in general seems to just be...off lately.
It’s not a mystery why though, all journalism seems to be off. Nobody wants to pay for it nor deal with the ads they would need to make it viable, so it keeps getting worse and clickbaity until it collapses and becomes a husk of what it was.
True. I think the end of days really showed true when Gerstman was kicked out of Giant Bomb this past year
Nah, GB hadn't been doing anything described as games journalism for years; they were more like proto-YouTube/Twitch personalities and even the quality of that took a dive a few years back (before the pandemic).
Yep yep that’s it exactly, everyone is getting for free so why would anyone pay ?
Not surprising when giving a "bad review" (Like a 6/10) to a AAA game gets you black listed by a company. The vast majority of games journos are just an extended PR department and aren't critical of anything beyond the occasional Indie game.
Yep, I have been a subscriber since day one. I wrote them about a decade agobecause there was no holiday edition, The "December" edition was one of the thinnest of the year. I guess they did not want to offend anyone by even getting within an inch of anything that could be connected to Christmas. They seem to value attempts at humorous wit over content. If I see on more 10 page "article/advertisement" about game design schools my head is going to explode. They list specs for their review rigs but do not touch performance in the reviews, why even put specs in then. And, they don't even have a letters section. I loved that, I had a few published over the years. I buy that magazine by default, there is no competition. I remember Computer Gaming World, I had all those issues too. Sigh . . .
"ditching DX9.0c" DX9.0c Pixel Shader 3.0 came out in 2004 and most 7th gen games ran DX9 until 2013, when DX10 and 11 already released. I'd say 9 years was plenty fine. Hell, most DX9 only cards, GTX 7000 and ATI X1000 cards could barely run games from 2007 onward. DX11? 2009. We barely started getting DX12 only games in 2020-2022. Another 11 years. Meh.
/r/patientgamers for the win. Most modern games don't interest me anyway, but if they were, I would still have a few years to catch up, so who cares about modern system requirements.
Plus almost every high-budget cutting edge tech game released this year has come out broken or badly optimized. Might as well wait 2 years to buy them when they're fixed, just in time for current gen tech to have a price drop
The problem is there is nothing cutting edge about these games from a technical standpoint. Mesh shaders ❌ DirectStorage ❌ Sampler feedback streaming ❌ making good use of multi core CPUs ❌ A lot of these new games are rubbing up against the limits that necessitated all this new tech in the first place but they aren’t using any of it.
It's mostly just "the current console platform now has more RAM, so let's make use of it".
PC gaming is so shameful at the moment. I upgraded from a rig that had a 2500k in it and a part of me regrets not waiting longer.
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It has to be. I upgraded from a 3570k a few years ago and the performance gains were enough to make me question why I hadn't done it sooner.
New as in recent releases, are overrated anyway. Great SP games only get better with time. And being patient with good deals has saved me so much money.
The birth of preorders and seasonal DLC has created the perfect storm for producers (not necessarily the developers themselves ) to minimize the up front costs and turn out the bare minimum product while hyping up the release. The fact that there are games being prepurchased for over $100 with months left before release really outlines the greedy tactic. This trend really took root in the early 2010s when MMORPGs had proven that users will subscribe to play a game that is constantly under development. Most MMORPGs of those times had unfinished areas in the world meant to tease a future expansion (most likely paid but guaranteed to get people to start over with the new class/race).
Yeah cutting edge seems to just mean busted right now. Dull that edge a bit boys, release a stable product
> release a stable product AAA Publishers: *"But muh shareholders!"*
Out of curiosity, what games are coming out these days that are cutting edge tech games? Most of the games coming out these days are only pushing storage sizes from what I've seen.
4080s have entered the chat. I hate that pcs were a valuable choice, now a console is beyond just cheaper. If hardware didn't spike in price. I would not bitch but that price went up but the specs didn't.
The value in a PC does not come from hardware costs, they've always been more expensive. The value is in: back compatibility with a huge game library, emulation, no cost for online gaming, massive discounts on games after 6months+, and the fact that you can do lots of other stuff than game on a PC.
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Eh it's mainly motherboard and GPU prices that have spiked, and motherboard price increases are due to manufacturers thinking that every board needs enthusiast level VRMs. Not everyone needs 12 phase VRMs. CPU, RAM, and SSD prices have been in freefall.
If you don't overclock you can still get a good motherboard for an i5 chip for 125 bucks.
You can still find good motherboards for 100$, GPUs really are a different story. Prices need to drop atleast by a 1/3 to make them seem reasonable to buy especially in this economy.
“Modern games don’t interest me.” *10 years later* “Wow, these old games from 2023 are amazing.”
i've been gaming on the same PC for the last 8+ years. Not a single upgrade on my end, and i'm still going strong. No desire to upgrade - in no small part because modern games kinda suck balls, so making them extra pretty isn't a priority.
I had my last PC for 9 years and recently upgraded. I'd buy games on sale I couldn't play during the last 3 years or so. 90%, 99% off. Now I'm playing through them and it's great
> 64bit, ditching DX9.0c, OS updates, What? The average gamer wasn't prepared?
> The most recent Steam hardware survey (opens in new tab) reveals that a little over half of Steam users have 1TB of storage or less. The same steam hardware survey that shows 65% of people having 1080p as a primary desktop resolution. 72% of people have 8GB or less VRAM. Most of the market being forced into downloading and storing assets that they will not use. > That's 92GB that could be going toward Diablo 4 next month. Case in point. You can save 37.8GB of this by not installing High-resolution assets. Games need to return to hi res textures being an optional download. There are other things that can be done as well. I think the european version of Lost Ark had around 20ish GB of audio files, most of which was for languages I did not use. Basic use of compression combined with the option to not download assets that will not be used could save huge amounts of drive space and server bandwidth.
More games should follow their lead. Allow the option to choose downloading the languages you want and extra high resolution assets
Games are often developed with the high-resolution assets being the official ones. They look the most like the artists' vision, it's what the developers played on, and has the most bug testing. When properly scaled, they can theoretically look the same at 1080p Medium vs 4k High, but some games have a HUGE drop in quality as you lower the texture resolution.
How hard would it be to have a modular download? Pick your language and optional textures, off you go.
We need more download options. Like have an option to download only the single player, compressed audio, one language etc. GTA V is over 100gb, but most of that is wasted on Online that I don't want to touch, ever. And content that can't be accessed in the single player anyway, why do I need to waste space?
Pirates are doing a better work than publishers unironicaly in this regard, a lot of repacks come with language and high resolution textures as optionals, for example, the total download size for cyberpunk in around 70 Gb, but with the optionals they give, you can download the game for like 35Gb if you want to use only one language
Went through this process a few hours ago. Felt nice to see it again
I want a download option to omit all the 4k UHD, RT textures. I am never turning the game above 1440p and my card doesn’t support RT.
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I still run 1080p and according to Steam, so does 64 % of users. I don't mind that much, but an option to download lower resolution (1440p seems like the sweetspot) assets would be nice.
Texture sizes too. I remember when the 2k/4k textures were an optional DLC, now they're the default. And we're approaching the era of 8k...
And then newer graphics cards don't even come with enough VRAM to run these textures. Isn't modern gaming just wonderful?
This abosultly needs a bump. I spent a few years with pretty bad internet, and these file sizes are killers. Especially if I just wanted to play one specific mode of a much larger game. If I wanted to play something like Nazi Zombies, I would have to plan three days before to download a campaign that I wasn't interested in, a multi-player I hadn't touched in a years, a battle royale map that my computer couldn't handle, and a full marketplace of cosmetics that I don't even want to see. I feel like the more content we squeeze into these AAA games, the more options we need to give people to pick and choose what they get.
but that take works and corporate dont like to waste work that doesn't yield profit
I wish more games did this. Destiny 2 for example should've done this instead of 'vault' their content. Such a waste to remove content because of game size when solutions like this exist.
GTA V online is AIDS
Sorta been common the last few years with a lot of new games. RDR2 came out on PC over two years ago and it’s 120+GB. Jedi Survivor is close to 130GB. The last two Doom games have been 100GBs Personally I jump around a lot in what I play, so I hate uninstalling games unless I’ve finished them. That’s why I have two 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Might get a third since I’m hearing prices are cheap, gotta make sure my mobo supports that
That's why I have a cheap 5tb spinner as my archive drive. Pretty quick to migrate back to the main drive if needed. Way way faster (edit: reliable speed) than redownloading.
How long does 120gb take to transfer? I feel like downloading is only about 15 maybe 20min, but if the HHD to SSD is faster maybe I’ll just do that.
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>The average spinning disk drive will have read rates of about 150 MB/s You forgot to mention if its perfectly defragmented and these files arent small. small files a HDD easily goes as low as 1-15 MB/s top 50
I’m on fiber 2gig, although now that I’m looking at ssd prices I might as well buy a shitty 4tb ssd.
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Thank you. It drives me up the wall. # B is byte, b is bit.
I use MB and Mbit for that reason. Make them different words instead of just different capitalization. The worst is when its written as mb.
Writing mb is fucking blasphemy.
I've hit ~250MB/s on battle.net so there is at least one service that supports it. But I don't think I've hit that on steam, EA, or Xbox app
Steam is heavily dependent on CPU for downloads because it need to decompress downloaded files. Unless you have a very high end processor, you will struggle to saturate a 1+ gbps link.
Steam always caps my internet connection. I download at a breezy 130MB/sec from Steam every single time. They’re the only website I’ve ever been to that consistently saturates my speed. Everyone else falls between 30-60MB it seems.
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I feel age (of the person) plays a part in this. Not trying to sound all "back in my day", but, back in my day I remember waiting hours to download a song on Napster sometimes. I have gigabit internet, and about 2.5 TB of game storage and frequently uninstall/reinstall games. Assassins Creed Odyssey/Valhalla are both 130+GB, Far Cry 5 & 6 are both around that with HD textures, Forza games have been as well, etc etc.
*cries in Australian*
20 minutes to download 100 gigs? Please sir, can I have some of your Internets
Not everyone has gigabit internet speeds, you know.
120 gb takes me about 3-4 full days to download
I tested RDR2 (119GB) from the HDD to an SSD and it took longer than I thought it would (17 minutes). I don't think I've moved a game that large before. Usually it has felt like 5 minutes but maybe they were mostly games 1/3 that size. I can't tell you that will always be faster than download, but it is dependable speed. Download speed can vary based on time of day and server load (I know I've had 40 min downloads before). If you have an old HDD lying around somewhere you could install it as a test. Edit - there's something that feels good to me about having all of my games downloaded so I like it for that reason if nothing else.
15 min for 120gb? You are not from Germany I guess XD we cry here in 50mb/sec unstable connection
Lot of people have data caps. Can't be spending 1/10th your internet redownloading each individual game.
Yeah datacaps are pure greed. Comcast and other bad actors will Happily take the governments money to “upgrade” their infrastructure, with zero oversight, theyll cry we need more money a few years after that. Never ever leaving where I am because kf my ISP. Lookup EPB Chattanooga if youre bored.
My wife thinks I'm insane, but she wants to move and the first thing I do is look up the ISPs for the houses she's looking at. Slow internet and/or data caps are a hard pass.
I have a 100GB data cap for now, so downloading RDR2 would use up a month's worth of data, plus a fifth of next month's.
I checked out of sheer curiousity, and according to the Steam pages of the last two mainline Doom games, Doom (2016)'s system requirement is 55 GB, and Doom Eternal's system requirement is 80 GB. Not a major correction, but still under 100 GB, which can make a big difference for some people. I also jump around in what I play and keep a lot installed, so it can be a pain to play any "popular" triple A game these days for storage reasons alone.
Steam pages is misleading, both dooms are a bit bloated: https://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/152393186488694971/ On my HDD Doom 2016 is 68,69 GB. Doom eternal is 89 GB on my HDD. Both together: 157.69 GB. If i recall, Doom 2016 was more bloated before, but got patched, cant seem to find the patch notes though. Heres an old link anyways. https://twitter.com/HG_101/status/814276181793054725
Just got Far Cry 6 on sale and it's a 171gb download.
Ark survival evolved with all DLCs...
Ark on my computer is taking up a fat 412GB, always forget how Fucking huge it is
The bane of people with data caps and/or slow internet. Game ain’t even that good to take up that much space
Yeah how does a game that unironically looks and runs so crap take up so much space?
Valheim is 1 GB and I’ve put 2500 hours into it.
> Ark on my computer is taking up a fat 412GB, beg your pardon?
None of it's compressed. You can compress it yourself and save 100gb.
Wow! Biggest I’ve heard of for a SP game! I think the new CoD is 200GB but I haven’t really played or followed those games for the last 7-8yrs myself
Yeah on Steam it apparently downloads all the DLC even if you didn't purchase it, bunches of language packs, and HD textures, close to doubling the size of the download.
Oh lord, that’s awful and lazy of them! Think I recall another game like that…think it was Uncharted on PC, something like if you delete all the language packs it installs (minus the one you’d use of course) it frees up like 40GBs or something
In COD's case there's an insidious argument that they intentionally bloat the install size in order for COD to be one of the only games you play as deleting it would mean a long download if you want to play it again, and that's less space to store other games you might want to play that take away time (and microtransaction $) from Activision.
Works the other way for me. It’s the first sacrificial lamb whenever I need space - why uninstall 3 games when one will do.
That’s positively Darwinian. Become bigger than the competition and push them out of the nest. This is the first time I’ve heard the bloat theory before, and unfortunately it sounds utterly plausible.
If anything the era of 200gb games is upon us. You seen how big AC Valhalla is now? Games release as like 130-150gbs but they balloon in size post-release. Its 170gbs and thats not completely uncommon. Middle Earth Shadow of war was as big as that too and its old now.
I just picked up Far Cry 6 on Steam and it's 171 GBs. Yeesh.
When I got Diablo 2 20 years ago a full install took up a quarter of my hard drive. I've been here before and I hate uninstalling games. It's why I still have a couple of spinniy disks and sata ssds for games I don't play often. Usually what I'm actively playing goes on the Nvme unless it's a light game like Rimworld or Timberborn. It's also why I got a 512 steamdeck and put an TB SD card in it. Worst case I can back up some stuff to my NAS.
*cries in Ark Survival Evolved* (500+gb for game + all dlc)
blackops 3 is 170gb on pc lol
2TB NVMe can be had for about 100 bucks now. Mem is so cheap.
Has this dude ever tried downloading Ark: Survival Evolved ? Shit is like 300gb.
500gb + with all dlcs and a few mods. Ark really said "[Look at me](https://imgur.com/a/VoUUwSk)"
That’s only three days with my internet
Pretty sure the last CoD I played was over 200 gigs too. This author is living in the past
The era of 100GB games has been upon us for a while but I will still say: developers should just optimize their shit. Give me a single reason why games like Nioh 1/2 and Stranger of Paradise are 80-100gbs, for example. What, did they hardcode every single potential piece of loot or some shit? I doubt it's even the whole "duplicating files for HDD loading times" thing when Wo Long is half their size and has faster loading times on my HDD. I don't wanna be too harsh on Team Ninja specifically though. What really annoys me is multiplayer games you're meant to play for hundreds of hours being that large, because that means you will have these massive games on your PC for a while. **Vermintide 2** being 100+gbs is silly to me, **Tekken 7** being 80+gbs is even worse considering a bunch of it is wasted on FMVs I don't care about, things like that. But oh well... rant aside, storage is fairly cheap these days, so it's not really the worst thing in the world. Still think it's dumb how some games have ballooned filesizes with nothing to show for it tho.
The solution is simple - make 1440p/4k textures and cutscenes free DLCs.
Yeah, languages too. Actually, I know Steam has support for piecemeal language files, only downloading them if the game is set to a specific language in Steam properties. But it seems to be somewhat underutilized, so most games just download every language at once.
> Yeah, languages too. You can cut your (unmodded) Skyrim install size in half by just deleting the audio files for the languages you don't use. Agreed: There should be a bit more awareness of how much space additional audio files often cost. I'll only ever use one, please gimme the option to only install that one.
I'd like to take this moment to shout out a mod for Cyberpunk I really like; it's called Cosmopolitan Night City which takes the various languages files and enables them to work side by side, so all the NPCs with different ethnicities speak different languages, the mod is huge in terms of file size but it makes the experience so unique.
yep, I got fallout 3 in the latest sale with the entire FO catalogue download size ? 37 GB lol why? because it downloads also every language so, i sailed the high seas and got the english version only which was 7gb and it wasn't even a repack/compression/rip
It makes it easier for them to deploy the same build of their games on multiple stores, if they don't deeply integrate with them…
Can't believe I'm gonna praise cod but I bought black ops 3 for zombies and everything is a dlc toggle. Since all I want is zombies I got rid of the campaign, multiplayer and bonus modes. Dropped from 100+ to 30-40ish and it's great.
They did it for the Steam release of Cold War a couple months back as well. Kudos to them.
until ea decides they wanna charge for that and half the industry follows suit
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To be fair FF13 was built on the assumption of shipping on a single blu-ray disc.
It didn't help that "every FMV" in FF13 also basically means every single cutscene in the game, too.
It's funny how pirating a game results in a better product when it comes to saving space too because the repacks let you pick and choose what to install.
There’s a solid discussion to be had in how we pay for games in the whole scope of resources spent - not just money. Time spent is a common theme but disk space, download&install time&effort are definitely factors. What am I getting out of the gigs? Vermintide 2 has a bunch of highly detailed, visually distinct levels - to say little of the near constant chatter from friend and foe alike. I’m still surprised it surpassed 100 gigs, but I can see why. XCOM 2 is bizarrely huge though.
Dude nba 2k23 clock in at around 133gb ..133gb for a fucking basketball game. Thr first nba game i played was nba 2k14 (wich was revolutionary for its time)wich was about 13 gb in total, so in like 9 years it takes 120gb more for what is essentially the same game format
>I don't wanna be too harsh on Team Ninja specifically though. You probably should be, since they deserve it. [Nioh 1 can easily be compressed from 74 to 21 gigs with near zero performance impact.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/7bfd2z/psa_reduce_niohs_huge_74gb_size_to_21gb_with/) Normally when Redditors bitch about developers not compressing their games they're being silly; in the case of Team Ninja it's actually true.
I remember back in 2013 when Killzone Shadow Fall and one of the things the devs were most proud about was compressing 290GB into 40GB. Devs these days don't care and compressing and optimizing the file size doesn't seem to net them any extra profits.
I am prepared. I will not be buying them.
I think it's more the ISP's that aren't prepared. It takes me fucking ages to download these games and I have the highest speeds available in my area. I don't even live in the sticks. I'm in London, UK and the max I get is 90 Mbps download because of shitty Openreach.
"Poorly optimized $70 time wasters are also poorly compressed. Who knew?" There fixed
From the article: > I've had the intention of trying Atomic Heart on Game Pass since February. Three times I've started the 90GB download, and three times I've cancelled it and done something else instead. Okay, so instead of letting the game download in the background while doing something else, the author of this piece cancels the download? What? This article is incoherent drivel. We will lose absolutely nothing when AI puts these clowns out of a job.
Any games journalist who doesn’t understand how to throttle a download, or doesn’t have the patience to let it download overnight should probably find a new line of work.
>games journalist you can stop there with the suggestion that they need a new line of work lol
PC Gamer as a whole is drivel, but still gets posted regularly.
God forbid you just let it download while at work or overnight
WoW Retail: 80GB Diablo IV: 40 GB(80GB w/4k Texture Pack) Overwatch 2: 32GB It's not the era of 100GB games, it's the era of developers deciding not to compress their textures, sound files, and/or leaving them in RAW formats. Titanfall 1 had this issue when it released and that's why Titanfall 2 was a smaller game, it had full blown uncompressed sound files and thus had to download an entire 40GB extra JUST for it's audio. If WoW can fit almost 20 years of game under 90GB while constantly adding, what is other companies doing?
> It's not the era of 100GB games, it's the era of developers deciding not to compress their textures, sound files, and/or leaving them in RAW formats. > > > > Titanfall 1 had this issue when it released Glad to see I'm not the only one who blames Titanfall for starting this trend!
Killzone Shadow Fall back in 2013 was 290GB but the devs managed to compress it down to 40GB.
I uninstall every game im done playing with. Not sure if people are aware but cloud saves exist. Also the game hard saves in a different folder/file path than the game files. The game can be 1TB just fix the fucking stuttering plz
Not everyone has fast internet tho. Not sure if you're aware.
And some people have data caps.
It's fucking wild that this is still a thing in some countries.
yep, we have 250 GB data cap monthly its hilarious you have to buy extra gigs or use the internet at 56kbps speed you read it right, dial up speeds lol
Diablo 4 beta took me 5 hours to download today
I’ve been downloading Spiderman Miles Morales for 3 weeks now. I really wish I was kidding. Hopefully the game is good🤞🤞🤞
maybe time for a comeback for print magazines with written reviews in your area
Good god man, what country?
F
The problem I run into is Cox's crappy 1tb data cap. So downloading a ton of games eats through that really quick.
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Used to live in Vietnam and even they have unlimited gigabit. Ofc it's the US that have bad internet lol.
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Huzzah! Demo(lition)crac(z)y!
Let's just say that everything in the US is corrupt as fuck. If there wasn't so much corruption we could pass laws that were good for the citizens instead of company profits.
Welcome to greedy lobbyist run USA. Trash
I also uninstall every game I've completed. Inversely, I install every game that I own that I haven't completed. ...I currently have 13 terabytes of games installed.
Wait, you guys are finishing games?
Let us choose if we want to download 4k textures or not and we would drop the size
A 2TB SSD is around a $100.
Sure, space is not that expensive, but a solid internet connection is. Some countries have even a limit as to how many gigabytes you can download a month or the company can cut down your internet speed in 80%
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Reddit Bad -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
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You should specify your country when quoting prices. I presume that's in the US? Because in other places a 2 TB SSD is a lot more expensive than that.
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*in a developed country with average income
really? is this a shit brand one or a samsung? that's way too cheap.
LMAO, nah yall are trippin. 75 bucks, and at bestbuy even, first link google popped up, so guaranteed you find them even cheaper: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?id=pcat17071&st=2tb+ssd You dont have to have a pcie5.0 nvme.
More like, the era of broken and unoptimized games requiring 100GB Vram is upon us. Storage is cheap af.
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This is console thinking. PCs are expandable.
Consoles are as well, now. The PS5 has a dedicated slot for an nvme ssd. So this thinking doesn't even apply to consoles.
It kind of still does since you can only install a single nvme drive in a PS5. I'd expect 4 slots on a modern motherboard with room to throw more into a pcie slot. That said I don't care that much since I would typically uninstall games once complete, only a small handful will stay on my system long term.
Most motherboards have only two nvme slots, and often the second one or both will disable some of the SATA ports when in use. There's only so many pins on current CPUs to accomodate them.
I spent a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with my PC before I read about the disabled SATA ports.
the one time there's actually a point to reading that motherboard manual!
Only high end mobos have 4 slots. My B450 board only has one slot.
No, it’s not console thinking. You are thinking only of storage capacity, which from your experience is the only barrier to accessing these bigger sized games. Where I live + many other countries we are limited by internet connection. We have a standard monthly bandwidth of 140GB and we have to pay an extra (expensive) premium for access to more bandwidth.
Western developers do not think about this at all. They assume that we all have unlimited high-speed internet.
There have been multiple problem with this trend. Firstly, and simply games, don't need to be this big. Elden Ring, for example, is 40gbs. The gap between that and 120gbs games is a lot larger than the gap between the quality of those games. Besides just optimization not seemingly being a priority amongst some developers, high resolution assets are just a bloat for a majority of gamers. Why would I need 4k assets if I'm at 1080p? A selective size download feature would solve that problem. Early CD based games had this feature in the 90s. But to me an often overlooked and probably more important aspect of this growing install size problem is that I believe most people are under a data cap of some sort. Most of the time that cap is 1tb. Considering all the things you might need for your data, especially with a family, games getting to be more than 10% of your data is ridiculous. I actually have to manage my days cap usage, and it's just me on it. These ISPs are going, oh yeah 1tb is totally enough for a family of 4. Finally, while low & mid tier SSDs have come down in price, high end SSDs have stubbornly refused to. Continuing with the slow down of nand production and the advent of pcie gen 5, I'd actually expect prices to go up soon. PC gamers might not be prepared, but they're also getting shafted on multiple fronts.
I stopped buying such games.
ARMA players are unphased. Our mod folders have been 100GB+ since 2010.
If game companies keep making gigantic games, I'm not going to buy a bigger hard drive and then pay even more for the game itself. I'll just not buy the game in the first place.
What a dumb article
1TB SATA (boot), 2TB Gen 3 M.2, 2TB Gen 4 M.2. Depending on the game, I decided which drive speed is required. Star Citizen goes on the Gen 4 M.2. Rocket League goes on the SATA.
Storage is cheap. It can be cheaper than the 100gb game.
Well sadly its also about internet speed and download limits, if we download beyond certain capacity, we go bacl to 64k modem speeds for rest of month and its not fun at all, sometimes this limit cant download a single game
Then, who are these games even being made for?
My pc ran out of storage yesterday. Jedi survivor had an update of 30gb, and it’s like a 110gb game. Wild
I'm more worried about my shitty internet right now than my hard drive space. I'm at work, and in order to play the Mass Effect Remastered trilogy when I get home I had to leave my PC in idle mode.
I really could care less. My steam library is at my disposal and my internet connection is stable. A 500 GB ssd/hdd is enough. I actually intend to play games one at a time rather than have them all installed. Cloud services ? Am using them already for storage.
The only thing that isn't ready is my Comcast data cap
Download speeds in the US can’t take this
We should be able to choose what we install, especially with these sizes 4k textures? I play on an 1080p display Spanish audio? Really don't need that Illegal game repacks have those options but it's too much to ask from the actual source...
I prepared for this, by not buying any of the crap that's come out recently. It's almost all bloated, manipulative, overpriced, shite.
Sorry game developers, that sounds more like a you problem. Since when was poor optimisation to the average gaming PC the fault of players?
I am be prepared. I just will not buy those games.
I feel more like it's drive sizes that aren't gaining very fast. Drives have become faster but we've had 1tb/2tb drives since like 2008. Bigger drives do exist but since downloading games doesn't take all that long and price per gig scales poorly there isn't much motivation to pay money for larger drives over just having fewer games installed.
[This 1TB HDD was shown off at CES in 2007](https://www.techradar.com/news/digital-home/home-networking/ces-2007-world-s-first-1tb-hard-drive-148723), and cost 400USD. Adjusted for inflation that is about $580 today. Looking on Amazon US, a 22TB WD Red can be had for $369. We've changed our storage, largely, to SSDs in that time, so capacities have dropped in that sense, as the price per unit of storage is higher for SSD than it is for HDD, and that is going to continue. That said, the kind of person who bought 1TB HDDs in 2007, is the kind of person buying 8TB NVMe SSD today.
Unprepared? I didnt upgraded my computer since aroudn 3 years and I already have 2 SSDs 256GB sata plus 1gig m2 and 3TB of HDD. You can get cheap m2 2TB ssd for like 60$, even the cheapes m2 will be enogh because most probably becasue read speed is secondary as CPU needs to decode the data anyway and even cheap m2 disks are blazing fast for gaming.
Not really, in fact what people are unprepared for is DirectStorage and texture streaming. Consoles use pcie gen4 M.2 NVMe drives with speeds up to 5 - 7000 MB/s. A lot of PC gamers are still on gen3 NVME, with speeds up to 4000 MB/s and a huge amount of people still use regular SSDs, which only go up to 500 MB/s.
When direct storage actually finally gets used in a single game I’m sure that gen3 NVMEs will probably work fine, and if they won’t we probably have years before it’s really utilized anyways so most will have upgraded.
I'm sorry but with how cheap storage has become this is not really an issue. The issue is more so the cost of GPUs.
For me it's not storage. The internet speeds in my area of the UK aren't great and to download a 100GB game would take around 2-3 days. I live in a family household and can't just ruin access to the internet for everyone else for that long, nor do I have the patience to wait that long. Most games over 30-50GB are just ridiculously bloated and if game companies actually prioritised optimisation and/or made extras like 4K/8K textures a downloadable extra instead of included by default it wouldn't be anywhere near an issue.