As an aside, I don't think you actually have fast internet - or whatever you are downloading doesn't have any mirrors even remotely close to you.

Assuming the GB is Gibibytes (worst case scenario), that is 730,144 Megabits (not bytes). With a 100 Megabit connection (lower end of what most ISPs offer that I've seen and still call it "high-speed") that should be done in about 2 hours. In 8 hours at 100 Mb speed you should be able to download over 300 Gigs of data.

85GB in 8-12 hours is somewhere between 17 and 25 Mbps, which would be stressed out by 1080p video streaming.

It's not Steam games, it's AAA games.

Save cost on optimization. Increase the demand for storage. Manufacture the need for data centers. Profit. Why make a product ready for you when they can sell you a problem and a solution along with it?

Indie games on Steam tend to be a few GBs at most.

What ticks me off about modern AAA games, and the “texture size” reason for large file size being mentioned in these comments, is just how misguided the effort is.

If your game is running in UE5 (as many modern AAA titles are), it probably has forced TAA and a bunch of other unoptimized garbage. With the TAA and misc frame interpolation nonsense you inevitably get smearing and weird shadows.

Who cares if you can make out individual hairs on a character whose hand just smear melded into the background for a few seconds? None of those fine textures are visible through the motion blur and bloom lighting and post-processing filters anyway. It’s absurd.

I’ve been playing The Talos Principle: Reawakening recently, which is a 2025 remake of the 2014 game, fresh with all of the UE5 bells and whistles. The old game looked pretty good, despite being made by a smaller team. It was a bit austere, but that fit with the theme and setting of the game. The new version looks objectively worse to me. Sure it has raytracing, but everything is a little blurry now even if you tweak the settings. As someone who loathes TAA I also can’t help but noting the smearing. In a game where noticing the details is important to solving the puzzles, focusing quickly on things matters. Sometimes I don’t even see an important laser connector tool until my third time in an area. Also, since it’s unoptimized as is par for the course, my 4090 isn’t enough to fight the frame dips down for a stuttery 30 fps in certain areas.

I’m sure there’s games where the larger textures have an impact, but if you’re burying them under several layers of blurry filters, I don’t see the point.

Modern games are typically large and have a lot of assets & textures. And these textures are high resolution (4096x4096 typically) and the downscaled versions are also stored.

Also, lack of optimization.

I know this is gonna sound like petty old guy complaints, but by God the save file sizes can be ridiculous! I have a smallish system drive that's just for the OS, mainly, and have games and media installed on a few other chunky ones. I never bothered changing save file locations, because... save files, they don't take up that much space, I've still got ~40GB or so to spare on the system drive, may as well leave it. Flash forward a few months after 3 of us have been playing Baldur's Gate 3 and I'm getting errors because there isn't enough room on the system drive. Take a look on TreeSize for the culprit, and there's BG3 taking up over 20GB of save files!

I get that it's ultimately on me for not managing files better, but I honestly never even thought of save files eating up tens of GB of storage.

Cheap storage and RAM availability (until recently) meant that developers could sacrifice space and minimize the amount of compression on assets.

Decompressing files require processing, and if you can avoid that, then you free up some computer resources.

Lack of optimization, and crazy texture packs

For a very simple element, consider that if you used to have texture resolutions of 256² = 65536 pixels, you now might easily have 4096² = ~16.7mil pixels, a 25480% increase.

So our 4k texture packs really guzzle up harddrive space. And that's ignoring how many many many more things there are to texture in the first place, how each element has multiple textures overlaid for shading, and all the other parts also needing more space like higher-def audio.

4K textures are a scam. With upscaling, even the people who run games in 4K don't use the 4K textures.

Various things:

• uncompressed audio (perhaps needlessly, for lower-end CPUs)
• pre-rendered cutscenes, multiple resolutions
• large texture sizes (also think normal maps etc), multiple resolutions
• redundant or unused data
• large model sizes, or more assets in general
• previous issues may be multiplied by multi-language support

I would also say it could be a problem of art direction, having no constraint and ignoring smart techniques that use less data.

Also, a higher-budget --> more preorders?
More data --> more game?

Storage and computing power was pretty cheap until recently, so it's just "wasted" time and money to optimize games. I think in the coming years games will be optimized more since everything is becoming so expensive.

As others have said, it’s mostly audio and textures, with some of it being the choice of engine. Lossless CD quality audio and ultra high resolution textures and bump maps for a jillion triangle models take up a lot of space. The actual executables are relatively small, though certainly the layers and layers of frameworks that make up modern software development are somewhat to blame.

I've seen a couple games that have the high res textures as a free separate download. That'd be nice. I'm not playing in 4k so I don't need all that extra crap.

Equal parts textures and arranging duplicate data next to each other for fast streaming

You can bypass it by not buying such large games. Plenty of good games under 5GB come out all the time.

Try to run any 3d modelling software and create something trivial, like a textured cube. Measure the size.

That's... not a very fast connection. 85 gb in 8 hours is about 25 Mbps, streaming 4k is only about 15-25, so maybe 50 Mbps total? The cheapest tier offered in my area is 100 Mbps. Gigabit is quickly becoming the standard.

It's like the Trojan war. A gifted horse has lots of other shit inside that you don't know about.