The Problem with Modern Games for Consoles

I am unlike any of my friends at college or from high school, the newest gaming console I have played on is my families Wii U. My family has mostly stayed a complete Nintendo platform only kind of family except for our PS2 which I incredibly enjoy. However most of my friends have Xbox's and PS4's so my only experience I have with these consoles comes from my friends where I spend most of my non-work time at school. 

One of my recent conversations with these friends started off like this:

Spencer: I only have 34 GBs left on my Xbox

 A few quick notes about this, Spencer is my friend with an Xbox One, it has a 500Gb internal hard drive, and Spencer only has 6 games installed on his Xbox. 

The conversation continued on about how video games now days take up incredible amounts of digital space on consoles, he recently bought Halo the Master Chief Collection which was a total of 68 GB's worth of data that had to be both ripped from the disks and also downloaded for the whole game. Granted Halo MCC is kind of a one off game where it is actually a collection of the first four Halo games remastered, yet when most games take up 30-70 GB's worth of storage there is a problem.

The central problem as to why these games require so much storage falls down to how games are played on modern consoles and how the game is actually packaged. For those who haven't played any games on these modern consoles, most games no longer require the disk to remain inside the console in order to play them. In many ways this is an incredible advancement from older consoles, no longer would you need to sort through tens of games just to look for the one you want to play. However most games require a ton of files, textures, game logic, and most importantly audio files. Textures can easily be compressed simply because they are basic images and 3d files. Surprisingly the audio files for all modern games aren't compressed, this causes these game files to remain so large even with advancements in console processors.

So what's the takeaway? Well game developers need to find a way to compress the entire game, audio files included to make them easier for players to install and save space so people can install more games on their consoles, also Microsoft and Sony really need to start selling 2 TB internal hard drives for their consoles to offer more game space.