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Why your games take up way more drive space than expected (even when uninstalled)

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Why your games take up way more drive space than expected (even when uninstalled)

If your gaming PC or console is struggling with storage, there are some things you want to check.

When the original Tomb Raider came out on PC, it asked for about 100MB of hard drive space. The latest Lara Croft adventure, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, needs 40GB for the base game. That's roughly a 400-fold jump, and plenty of modern games follow the same pattern. Worse, when you uninstall one to make room for the next, some of that data can stay behind.

So why do games take up so much space today? Let's dig in.

Every game on a digital store lists the space it needs, and it's easy to see why. (A new drive can also show less storage than advertised, which makes every gigabyte count for more.) You need to know in advance whether you have enough free room on your drive and how much of your internet plan the download is about to eat. But that number is only for the base game. Patches, DLC and other extra content get added on top of it, and Steam treats DLC you own as part of the game itself.

Then there's the day-one patch. In the past few years, a lot of publishers have shipped a bare-bones version of a game and pushed the rest as a download at launch. On consoles, where storage is already tight, that can hurt. On PS4, Fallout 76 launched with a 54GB day-one patch on top of its 45GB base install, and Ubisoft told The Division 2 players on Xbox One and PC to expect a 48GB to 52GB download for its first update.


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