The 5 BIGGEST Video Games (Memory Wise) Ever Made

I will never forget my most jarring video game experience, memory wise. Not speaking of my actual memory, but rather, the size of a game and the time it takes to install. I bought GTA V at the midnight launch like most people who read this site, but unlike most of you, I did not see the press release Rockstar released a week before the game dropped warning people how long it would take to install. Now if I were rational, I should have assumed as much (massive game, open world, minimal load times) but I was too excited and didn’t process it until I got home that night and sat watching the game install for three to four hours. Now I will be the first one to admit, GTA V was well worth it, but that first night, it was hell.

Like GTA V (8 gigs on PS3, 42 gigs on PS4) here are games that were so massive, they ate up half your memory upon installation.

The Witcher 3

Big man, big horse, big world, big game. Makes sense when you do the maths.

The Witcher 3 fills up almost 29 gigs of memory, The Witcher 3 became most famous for being the game you could build an actual house around while it installed. I kid, I kid. It is a massive game, though, and one that sets up this list quite nicely.

While the end result may be one of the most impressive open world games of all time steeped heavily in its own lore, once you found out the size of the game (and install time), you realized, this is one game that wasn’t playing around. But it was well worth it in the end.

*That’s what Yen said.

Until Dawn

The size of the game was one thing, your need to wear diapers while playing it, another.

I expected more cinematic games like this to make up the list (games heavy on cut-scenes like Metal Gears and such), but this is really the only game like this on the entire list. Weighing in at 35 gigs, Until Dawn is a horror game that most would not have even been able to dream about playing even five years ago, yet here it is.

Though the further down the list we get, you will see 35 gigs is not that impressive, Until Dawn is well worth it for all the genuine scares they ram into those 35 gigs.

Get it, RAM? I love bad-yet-timely jokes.

God of War 3 Remaster

If SO much memory is needed to make the gore this perfect, I am okay with that.

God of War was really impressive when it hit the PS2, and you could tell how hard it made the console’s CPU work. But we all knew by the time we got God of War 3 on PS3, it would be huge (and perfect) but we knew it would most likely be a sizeable game, and it was. But not like the remaster for 8th generation consoles, where it leapt to a memory size of almost 38 gigs.

Yes, the game looked gorgeous, had tons of cutscenes, and played great, so what do you expect? Last of Us Remastered was up there too, with 2 more gigs of memory than this game, coming in at 40. Guess those remasters are heavy on the memory.

Destiny

Destiny has now become the size of real life (and cost of living is comparable, too).

Coming in at a whopping 40 gigs at the start, Destiny should at least have the common courtesy to ship with another hard drive you can use just for that game. What’s even better (or worse depending on your stance), if you add all the DLC and expansions that have dropped since, you are looking at a video game so massive, it’s actually TOO big for some people’s rigs. Laugh if you want but it’s true.

In other words, if they chose to install Destiny, it would mean they essentially could never install another game.

Now THAT is commitment to a franchise.

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Edition

Amazing cinematics like this are a good reason the memory needed for this game is so huge.

I read the memory size of this game and had to check it on multiple sites to make sure it was accurate. Though I heard buzzing about this when the game launched, I had no idea. 58 gigs? Are you kidding me? Hard to remember the days when the whole game would come fit into one small chip inside a cartridge. Those days are long gone now, and Diablo 3 proves it.

Now your average video game, in modern time, takes more memory than a N.E.S running all its games at once. Try and mull that over for a minute. It’s crazy to try and fathom the growth over the generations. At the end of the day, though, for the leaps and bounds gaming has made in the last decade, visually and otherwise, these giant leaps in memory usage doesn’t shock me. What does have me a bit scared though is how much massive are games going to get in the next ten years. If big games now come in at almost 60 gigs and take whole days to install, what will it be like in 2026? Which, as surreal as it sounds, is only ten years away.

Our minds cannot even begin to fathom…