Today I read about games that demand 150GB or 175GB or more of disk space because of massive high-res textures that a lot of people with modest graphics cards and monitors will never need. I don’t have a lot of games installed on my new computer, but it got me curious.
WizTree is a nifty program that quickly scans a drive to see what’s taking up space, and gives you a graph grouped by folder and color-coded by file type, making the worst offenders easy to see at a glance. Handy!
It turns out that Dirt Rally 2.0, the only “big” game I have installed, is consuming 83.8GB of my 1TB hard drive. That is almost exactly the same size as my entire MP3 library of 11,491 songs.
And when I looked further, I found that at least 14.1GB of that is DLC content that I haven’t paid for and can’t play… a complete waste, in other words. There’s probably a couple more gigs in the Cars folder.
I will experimentally move those files to my old SSD (which is now acting as a USB backup drive), but I’m pretty sure Steam will see that they’re missing and “helpfully” redownload them for me. If not immediately, then next time it updates. And because the game is partially online, I can’t not update.
I do enjoy the game, but geez, that is stupid. You should (A) by default, not download content you don’t own, and (B) for the content you do own, choose whether to install ultra high resolution textures you’re never going to see (with the default chosen reasonably based on your graphics card/monitor resolution).
All of the other games I have installed — Noita, Slay the Spire, Nova Drift, Islands and Bejeweled — total under 2 gigabytes.
It’s not so easy to estimate the total of all my installed music production software, but my visual estimate — including all of the sample libraries I’ll mostly never use, presets I’ll mostly never use, reverb impulse responses, stray installer files, redundant versions etc. — puts it at about 50GB.