What takes up the majority of the storage space in video games?

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I've been curious recently about why text/code seems to take up so little storage but videogame applications are enormous in size. For example, a game like Warzone is over 100 Gb.

Link to see how enormous the maps are: https://www.gamesatlas.com/cod-modern-warfare/guides/call-of-duty-warzone-map-all-cod-battle-royale-locations

I've done some research and think that it has something to do with the complex landscapes that are created in the videogames. Those don't seem to be lines of code that a developer has written but rather creating some sort of 3D environment for your game to run in.

What about something like Windows or other operating systems? Is there entire storage "weight" of what is downloaded code or data that is being downloaded as well to make the applications done?

If the majority of it is code, how do those enormous organizations write so many lines of code to take up so much storage?

software-distribution software-design storage
1 Answers

It just depends on the game. For triple A games, I woukd say most of it is binary data like texture, models, media (like video, cinematic, audio). Then you have the way your game is packed and lot of dependencies like C Redistribuable, game engines, physics engine, libraries, etc ... While many of those are not used they may still be packed in the game. For some "indie" games like Minecraft, I wouldn't be surprise code is what take most of the space (or Audio I guess ?). Note that the map can be larger than the game too ... What you can do is use a tool like Windirstats to check what is happening, but It will not find dependencies that are out of the folder.

For the codebase, I guess its mainly automated through games engines.

Here is an example for Conan Exile : Conan exile space

So it's mainly texture data (GraniteSDK), the game engine files is 115MB and executable are 100MB (note that it has Battleye anti-cheat packed, + the server version of the game). Video is 500MO ...

Another example for Minecraft : Minecraft space

Which is (contrary to what I expected) mainly texture/sound data.

What about, let's say, Chrome ? enter image description here Interpretation : I have no clue :D.

Last one: enter image description here enter image description here Python itself is not quite big. But all the dependencies, their dependencies (the dlls, etc) are quite big at the end.

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