RAGE, a game from 2011 takes 25 GB, with compression and blurry graphics. DOOM (2016) is 55GB and Doom Eternal is 80GB.

The reason: huge textures, where every detail is unique and that look good up close. Let's say you map the world at a millimeter scale, let's a byte per mm2, 1GB is 1000m2, which is about the size of a typical backyard, small maps are bigger than that, have a bunch of them and you can get to tens of GB easily. Plus textures are not just colors. Normals, material properties, etc... are mapped to textures too.

I don't know how Counter-Strike 2 gets to 85GB, but if you want things to look good up close and avoid repetition you get these sizes. Also, storage is cheap, so if it makes the game look better, why not use it?

I thought the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was already in the vicinity of 80GB and Counter-Strike 2 has launched with fewer maps hasn't it?

CSGO was closer to 24GB.

85gb is large, but not that large.

Halo Infinite is around 50gb but has compressed textures and audio so it can fit on a blueray disk for Xbox One (the third xbox). It's a very cookie-cutter game and also far far smaller on biomes compared to previous halo games (I think it's only 2-3: mountain grasslands, and desert on a multiplayer map, and interiors if together you want to call them a biome).

PC games will tend not to use compressed textures and audio so the games load faster (they don't need to spend time decompressing) so they can easily reach 85gb. Faster loads is more important in games where there are many matches.

Borderlands 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare are about 135gb.

ARK is about 250gb.

My wife asked me to install ARK for her recently, and it was 500GB. The ship has sailed.

ARK is the poster child of unoptimized messes, though. It might be a bad example.

Someone hit me with the trivia: How big was Titanfall 1 initially, with its library of totally uncompressed audio for every localization in the base install?

I installed Titanfall last month and it between 50GB and 60GB (I don't remember exactly).

Ark Survival Evolved ? Base game should be around 135GB, and you don't have to install all the different maps at the same time since you won't be switching between them frequently. If you want to run a dedicated server on top of that, those are around 25GB per map, so it is not that crazy I think.

No idea. I am just reporting what I saw when I clicked "install" for her. I'm not into survival games so I don't play it, I just know I was stunned at the requirement and that she had to remove other games to fit it on her PC's SSD.

High quality models, textures, animations and more takes a lot of space, like a lot a lot.

But, I just installed CS2 and I think it only downloaded about 20GB or so, that maybe decompresses to about 40GB in the end. Maybe someone else can verify what it ended up taking on disk?

Steam's downloads are definitely quite compressed.

That's a lot of high def textures, yep. Every (base) gun, user model, map. If you'd asked me over/under on 90 gigs I'd have really struggled to guess right.

There are 1000s of skins and 10s of maps built into the game.

The storage requirement is inflated. On disk, CS2 takes 33,6 GB (36 090 429 440 bytes), which is less than 50% of the mentioned 85GB.

Thanks for the number. Why do they inflate the disk space needed by a factor of ~2.5 I wonder...

I understand you would want to have some leeway so someone playing the game doesn't surpass the 'disk space required' within the first three days just because of a few additional maps/skins/textures downloaded while playing... but over 50 gb of leeway given an install size of 33.6 gb?

Maybe pointing towards something else about gaming I don't understand...