More like the complete version happens to be 50 GB larger than the shipped on-disc data, judging from the 96 GB install size. The maximum size of a Blu-Ray is about 50 GB, so we're hitting the point where games are too big to even fit on a single disc and it's almost just acting as a dongle for the download version.
On XBox and PC, the free space requirement is 60gB; on PC the game folder winds up at 49gB.
The PS4 needs 96gB free because its digital installers work by downloading everything, then copying things to where they need to go, and then deleting the download. At 99.99% installed, there are two copies of the game on disk, and if there's not enough space for that, the install fails.
red dead redemption 2 recently released and required two discs. one was data only, whcih was copied off. the other disc was data plus the playable disc. this is the first ps4 game i have seen do that, but i don't know if there are others.
Lemon lists 11 games for the Amiga that had more than 10 floppy disks. I owned 4 of them (Indy 4, Monkey Island 2, Flight of the Amazon Queen, and Beneath a Steel Sky).
Luckily I had a hard disk. I don't even remember that BaSS had 15 disks! That must have taken a whole evening to install that thing. But it took only 12 MB on the hard disk although that was 10% of the whole disk capacity. Times sure have changed.
In 2002 I decided to install Windows 95 on a black & white Win3.1-based laptop, just for the heck of it. It had a one or two hundred megabyte hard drive, but only a floppy drive for I/O, so it felt like metaphorically building a ship in a bottle. Unfortunately by the 2000s the quality of floppy disks was atrocious. I had to go through three boxes (about 75 disks) to come up with a set of 21 Windows 95 install disks that had no write or read errors.
Later I realized I could have done the job, and faster, using just two disks: one in the computer writing the disk images and one in laptop reading the disk (and then swap disks & overwrite with the next image). D'oh!
The difference between Win 3.1 and Win 95 was really life changing. The usability of Win 95 certainly sped up adoption of the Web by non-university/govt users.
My first Linux distro was SLS, sporting Linux kernel version 0.99pl12, and it came on 15 5.25in floppies. I only had Usenet at the time, so I wasn't able to download it directly, and had to pay some random person to mail me the floppies.
I was then setting up my own little TCP/IP network with a NFS server on my two machines, connected via coax Ethernet using NE2000 network cards.
Thank goodness for CD-ROMs. Only a few years after that, I was able to just go into a computer store and just buy a single CD with Yggdrasil (or RH or Slackware) which made the whole process much easier. As long as your system could boot off of CD-ROM... sometimes you still needed to make a boot disk.
I had a friend that only used two floppies... one installing on a new computer, the other downloading the next disk... (isdn line) It actually worked out pretty well.
I remember autocad 12 + extensions on floppies... loading for a lab. Man that was the series of installs that just wouldn't end. IIRC win9x on floppy was almost as bad.
Redbox sent me an email that had a picture of RDR2 "Disc 1" in the list of new games. I wasn't sure what that meant, and figured that data disc might have had a gimped version of the game with only one or two chapters.
Turns out, you have to rent both discs to play! One to install (which took like two hours for me, if not more), and one to play. I guess you only need to rent one disc after that, but they're still getting at least $6 out of anybody that wants to play.
> More like the complete version happens to be 50 GB larger than the shipped on-disc data, judging from the 96 GB install size
Compressed distributions that are expanded for install have been used at least since floppies were the main distribution media for isn't all to fixed disks.
Distribution media (and the fixed disks they install to) may be on the order of 5 orders of magnitude larger now, but that hasn't changed.
I don't think that's as true as it once was - the majority of that 96GB is almost certainly media of some kind - images, textures, music, etc. - they don't losslessly compress well at all.
I thought disk I/O was a major blocker for loading in games, which would imply you'd want to keep things compressed on disk.
Additionally, as another commenter pointed out, the majority of assets are in formats that support native compression (textures and audio) and thus won't compress too well a 2nd time.
I can't find info about it being "reader-compatible". According to a brief note in wikipedia, it has a different metadata format from blu-ray, so would it at least need different firmware in the drive?
