Xbox 360 What's up with Xbox 360 games needing so much memory to play?

[novasparker]

Ok, so this is probably addressed somewhere in this forum, but I bought my son GTA 5 a few weeks back and got a rude awakening when we got home thanks to not having enough memory to install the disc. I bought him the 4GB unit and had no idea that there are certain games out there that require 8 GBs or more in memory just to install. This seems a bit excessive to me. We remedied the situation (at least temporarily) by getting a flash drive to handle the load, but if he winds up with more games like this, we are going to have to upgrade to a larger hard drive. Is this common for the newer Xbox games? Is it just a ploy to make you sink more money into Microsoft?

 

[Oldman Jr]

gta 5 is one of the few games that include a separate disk that must be installed, for the most part it's usually just dlc disks but yea, 8gb isn't that bad. haha wait until/if you get an xbone where they are all mandatory and are more then 30gb (cod:ghosts, Forza 5, BF4, and ryse) oh and then there's NBA 2k14....(43gb)

 

[Outrun]

Ok, so this is probably addressed somewhere in this forum, but I bought my son GTA 5 a few weeks back and got a rude awakening when we got home thanks to not having enough memory to install the disc. I bought him the 4GB unit and had no idea that there are certain games out there that require 8 GBs or more in memory just to install. This seems a bit excessive to me. We remedied the situation (at least temporarily) by getting a flash drive to handle the load, but if he winds up with more games like this, we are going to have to upgrade to a larger hard drive. Is this common for the newer Xbox games? Is it just a ploy to make you sink more money into Microsoft?

'

I'd say 40% to sink more money into Microsoft and 60% deciding to install the disc instead of just playing from disc. Like Oldman Jr. said, the games have gotten chunky as hell and will only get more chunky.

 

[MetalSwift]

Those numbers sound about right to me, really. 4GB would probably just carry you for some older games that were released on O.G Xbox originally and are now on Xbox Live.

 

[ThunderSteel]

50% games just being larger (as mentioned before here, they get bigger by Xbox One) and 50% trying to get you buy more stuff.

 

[heavensdevil]

Games are getting larger in size due to them getting more advanced in terms of graphics. Installing games can cut back on the load times and stress on the disc drive. Some games need a mandatory installation like GTA 5 such as Battlefield 4. Sometimes the data is split on different discs like Disc 1 and 2 so you need the data installed so the Xbox can excess the contents when you're playing a different disc.

 

[GetFresh]

It's possible that it is a ploy. When I bought Battlefield 4 I had no idea an actual hard drive was required. After a couple days I ended up buying a hard drive which means spending more money.

 

[RivaCom]

It's mainly used for a cache. With large and open world games. The view distance/load times is much to slow to load straight from disc. So they put the most commonly used data on local disk to speed up cache.

Also a few years ago they started perfecting a new disc/burning tech that allowed them to use a little more data per disc. In 8 years, games have grown in size, better sound, graphics, and content.