[Boilerbuzz]

Quote: Originally Posted by Haval93

Some thought to put out there. Just because a game takes up a huge amount of space doesn't mean it has a crazy amount of content. One reason and probably the biggest is graphical assets, non-compressed textures and assets will take up a huge amount of space. Two big examples are Max Payne and Skyrim. Max Payne was a large game on the PC because of it's uncompressed textures. Same with Skyrim, they released a HD texture pack that was a couple GB's of data. Uncompressed audio files will do the same, and so does videos. In NBA Live's case they simply could of really compressed all their files while other games know they have more space and didn't want to since they haven't taken up the whole disc space. There are a lot of reasons going into how large a game size is. Forza 5 is releasing with only 200 cars and less tracks than Forza 4(Over 500 cars if I am not mistaken) and it is a much bigger game size compared to Forza 4. Anways sorry for the long post.

This is actually quite a reasonable assumption. You are right. You can have anywhere from a 4x to 10x compression ratio depending on the file formats. The ONLY problem I have with this theory, though, is that with SO much room available on the disk, why give yourself the unneeded overhead to decompress that data. Since games are installed, there isn't much of a win in speeding up the reading from disk either.

Good point, though.