The biggest games by install size, real mighty storage hogs
Call it morbid curiosity, but I've been searching around to find the most byte-breakingly big games on the planet today. My journey has taken me across land and launcher to find the most expansive, detailed, or simply downright massive game install directories you may find on your gaming PC—some so chunky that they often won't fit on 128GB SSDs. Hell, some are too great for even 256GB drives.
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Alright, I'll admit I cheated a little by tweeting out 'Which game takes up the most storage space on your PC right now?' on the PC Gamer Twitter account. Thank you to everyone that got back to me—except you, person that said Chip's Challenge. From your responses it was pretty quick to collate a draft of the world's biggest videogames, and from there a little sleuthing of my own and the wider PC Gamer team's Steam accounts had it narrowed down to the final list before you today.
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Which game takes up the most storage space on your PC right now? pic.twitter.com/lLMaLDxqRmOctober 7, 2020
It's pretty unlikely that you're searching for the biggest games with which to load up your gaming PC, but considering some of today's storage-battering games are also the most popular—Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone for example—it can be difficult to avoid byte-hungry applications eating away at your new SSD.
If you've got to be careful where or to what you allocate your precious bits to, then there's likely some use in knowing which games are storage hogs before you drop $50 on one. This is a public service after all.
All game install sizes are correct at the time when I checked, and only relevant to PC. These are likely subject to change—just bear that in mind before you pen me a rude email. Also consider how some game developers are mastering the art of dark magic and somehow shaving install sizes down to a fraction of what they once were.
Take Fortnite's recent patch, for example, which shaved 60GB off the overall game install size, taking it down to around 30GB overall. Tim Sweeney's probably awoken some great evil and doomed us all to the Seventh Circle of Hell to do it, but it's a great move for budget-friendly Fortnite PC builds in the meantime.
The largest game install sizes (in descending order)
231GB - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Don't act surprised, we all knew this was coming. With both Modern Warfare and Warzone combined, today's CoD is one of the most chonky games in existence. If not the chonkiest.
149GB - Hitman 2
No, really. With all the DLC, Hitman 2 essentially includes Hitman, and that means a whole other game's worth of textures and other digitally heavy things. Outfits and such.
131GB - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege (with HD texture packs)
R6 Siege is a welterweight of epic proportions, with or without the HD texture packs. But let's throw them in for good measure.
127GB - Microsoft Flight Simulator
Planet Earth on a 1:1 scale, enough said.
116GB - Red Dead Redemption 2
There is an overwhelming level of detail to near-enough every aspect of Red Dead Redemption 2, right the way down to the horse balls. Am I allowed to say horse balls?
116GB - Borderlands 3
All those uncompressed Claptrap jokes make for a mighty install. Sorry, "jokes".
112GB - ARK: Survival Evolved
I didn't see this one coming, but apparently ARK isn't all about wooden shacks and dinosaur friends anymore. There's now over 100GB of miscellaneous island content.
110GB - Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
You could visit Greece during a global pandemic or you could play Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and get nearly the same experience. That's a lie but it is a pretty game, and huge.
94GB - Vermintide 2
Basically Destiny but with rats, so it's not all that surprising to see it nearly match Destiny 2 in game install size.
92GB - Destiny 2
Bungie has admitted it's a little daunting to oversee all of Destiny 2's content, and that's why it's dropping some of it with the next expansion.
90GB - Grand Theft Auto 5
What is there left to say about GTA 5 at this point? Oh, nothing. Moving on.
89GB - Battlefield V
Grand operations really cranked up the scale of Battlefield's already sizeable multiplayer, and install size ballooned alongside all the nifty new game modes and features.
86GB - Gears 5
Microsoft may have ditched the 'of War' but that still leaves plenty of big, heavy gears lying around—86GB worth.
86GB - Final Fantasy XV
Most of that 86GB is made up of hair styles for those four moody-looking lads.
82GB - Baldur's Gate 3
We're only one act in and the game is already 82GB. This one is surely going to surge up this list by the time it leaves early access.
77GB - Forza Horizon 4
It's never a surprise to see a car game hogging lots of storage space. There's a whole subgenre of racing games dedicated to just looking at fancy cars, so they must be up to a high standard.
70GB - Metro Exodus
Despite previous Metro games taking place mostly within a metro tunnel, there's quite a bit more to this one. It's also gorgeous in that messed up, gritty way.
68GB - Half-Life: Alyx
This one's easy: It's a virtual reality game, Valve had to be careful to render the bottoms of objects and under tables just in case you pesky gamers took a peek behind the curtain.
67GB - World of Warcraft
As it stands today, World of Warcraft is a fairly chunky beast at 67GB. That's likely to increase once Shadowlands rolls around later this year, too.
64GB - Death Stranding
Mostly just for rendering an accurate depiction of Norman Reedus' face, as Kojima Productions is contractually obliged to.
Honourable mentions
While the base games of all four of these titles aren't all that massive, comparatively anyways, you could certainly make them that way in a flash. All it takes is a mod manager and a trigger finger...
- Skyrim
- Gary's Mod
- Assetto Corsa
- Fallout 4
First published October 22, 2020.