What makes the biggest difference in how much drive space games take up?

[StaceyPowers]

Why do some games take up so much hard drive space while others take up so little? Sometimes I am surprised, as it seems like games that I would expect to be massive given their graphics, etc. or the sizes of their environments are fairly small. What factors make the biggest difference?

[killamch89]

The development processes of various video game companies play a factor - How much detail they want in their games, how they code the games among other things.

[Empire]

Most games do take so much space nowdays more then many years ago. MSFS2020 for me it's around 360GB in size 🙂 That's with everything from payware addons and freeware addons and everything else that has to be there 😛 One of my addons that I have is like 8GB itself. 

With games in 4k and whatnot files have to be higher anyway. But remove games and files that you do not want anymore and keep the others

[Shagger]

It's mostly down to the size of the textures. Sharper, more detailed textures, especially when they're meant to be displayed on higher resolution screens, take up more space. And quite obviously the bigger tha open world, the more textures it contains and the more space it will take up.

 

Open worlds will also take up more space because thier textures are going to be viewed at wider variety of angles and distances. Open worlds also will have more opjects with their own boundaries to be programmed in rather that just being textures that can't be interacted with.

[Justin11]

I think the graphics and game functionality, I am into video editing and I have found out that a higher video quality takes up more space than that of the lower video quality and that is also same for the graphic quality of a video game.

The video needs to be functional and a particular technology is used to achieve this and to have it running it takes up a good amount of drive space.