It's no secret game install sizes have been growing steadily over the years but, for the next generation of games, we might need a whole lot more storage space if we want to keep up.
Best CPU for gaming: the top chips from Intel and AMD
Best graphics card: your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: get into the game ahead of the rest
The Unreal Engine 5 welcome video treated us to a demo of a bunch of cool features set to come with the early 2022 launch. But development tools and stunning vistas like those shown come at a heavy cost, and storage is one of those areas that's going to be beaten down the hardest.
Game install sizes already take the mickey, with some real mighty storage hogs around, and just the demo sample project for UE5, Valley of the Ancient, is 100GB alone. That's not including the 10GB for the engine itself.
With the ability to directly import assets "comprised of millions of polygons—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans," and a host of other super intensive features, its fair to say the next wave of games are going to eat deep into that precious SSD storage space.
Back when Unreal Engine 5 was first announced, we spoke to some developers about their thoughts on the engine and one of the prevailing topics that came up was, you guessed it, install sizes.
"The only drawback I see is exponentially increasing the install size of the game," Stephen Kick of Nightdive Studios says, "which even now is nearing 100GB or more for some titles."
Prepare yourselves—we're either going to need racks upon racks of SSDs, or storage solutions are going to have to catch up pretty darn fast.
