why don't all of the games are 1 GB size? wouldn't a 1 GB Super mario land 3 mean it could have had 'double' the features/levels/graphics etc? if it is pricing related, they are all equally priced in USA right? (i know it is not the case in Japan)

Having space available doesn't mean it's necessarily a good design decision to actively use that space. In your example of Super Mario 3D Land, if they added more features/levels/graphics then that would take more design and development effort, and almost certainly more QA testing. This would take extra time and delay the release of the game. It would also increase the budget required to pay those workers and possibly affect the end cost to consumers. There is also no assurance that adding extra content would make sense in the context of the original game planning and design.


In the end, you aren't buying a game because it takes up a lot of space. You are buying a game because it's fun to play.  Developers usually won't go into a project looking to use up all of the available space. They go into a project with a vision of what they want to create and use as much (not more, and hopefully not having to compress into less) space as that vision requires. Creating a game that is "too small" is never a problem if the original vision is met.


As for pricing, there isn't much change from the consumer standpoint. Gamers rarely know or care how much space a game takes up, and it usually doesn't affect pricing of new games at release. But to a developer/publisher, smaller is always better since game cards with less memory are generally cheaper to buy - which means slightly better profit margins than games that require larger cards. When you start saving a couple of dollars per game, and then multiply that by a hundred thousand games it can have a big effect.

So, I wonder how long before Nintendo will put out games that are as big or bigger than the SD card that shipped with the system (e.g. Kid Icarus Uprising).

The block space isn't the problem. It's their prices. They are digital prices, they should be cheaper than retail...

@ejamer

Developers favor smaller storage space? If that was true, then Rockstar (along with many other developers) wouldn't have complained about the Xbox 360's measly 9 GB DVD format, and we wouldn't have a need for Blu-Ray. Even Nintendo saw the need for 25 GB discs in the Wii U.

I'll field this one.

They favor Cheaper storage space. 
On Carts that means the smallest cart they can go with which will be the cheapest for them.
On DVD that means keeping the game to 8GB.
Interestingly enough Digitally its an analog graph because your charged for the bandwidth your used.  (If I sold 100 copies of a 100MB game I would make more than if I sold 100 copies of a 1GB game digitally)
Etc. Etc.

Once Space isn't a factor it becomes whats easiest.

Totally agree with the last part. Developers always care about what's easiest when performance and pricing aren't issues.  Unfortunately, price and performance are almost always issues that need to be considered.

I am so glad I invested in at 16GB SD card!  :D

I have a 4gb car sitting and waiting for Animal Crossing.

Just imagine how many levels you could fill into 1GB of Super Mario Bros 3! Except you'd run out of ideas well before the first MB is filled...

Judging from the sizes above possible every NES, SNES, and Portable Mario Platformer.

It's interesting how they are all an exact size except for one. Did these games happen to hit the sizes exactly, or do the digital versions still contain the filler space of the retail versions?

640 MB is still 5/8 GB, so even though it doesn't seem like a standard size it's still a pretty normal looking fraction.


My guess is that digital games include the same filler space that retail ones contain, and are just dumped to the digital format "as is" without any optimization. It's just a guess though. No idea what the available card sizes are for 3DS releases.

If 8GB is still feasible, then there wouldn't be a need to use bigger discs. HD content comes with larger file sizes, and if you want to cram all that data on a disc without compressing it, you need a larger disc capacity. 8GB isn't enough for most HD games, because everything needs to be compressed in order to fit on that disc.


The same goes for HD movies.


Sony saw the problem beforehand, and that's why they had the PS3 adopt Blu-Ray for it's games. Nintendo is thinking ahead, and is also using a larger capacity disc for Wii U games. And the developers likely asked them to do this.


Microsoft is still stuck using outdated DVD, which means every game made for the Xbox 360 will have to be highly compressed to fit all those HD visuals on the disc. With Blu-Ray, you don't have that problem, which is why the entertainment industry created it in the first place.

Game sizes had nothing to do with Sony using Blu-ray Disc for PS3. BD is Sony's baby (they helped create it and are the biggest backers of it), and they used it for PS3 to help increase the marketshare of it and compete against HD DVD. The majority of current gen HD games easily fit on a 8GB DVD disc.

But a lot of that HD content has to be compressed to fit on a standard DVD. It's the reason why HD movies aren't on standard DVD.

They still have to be compressed on BD too since uncompressed audio and video is huge (a general rule of thumb for audio is that uncompressed audio is twice as large as the compressed version). Games on BD tend to use most of that disc to have the same content more than once (to reduce the loading times that result from the larger disc size).

Ha, I love the fact that Pilotwings Resort is only 128 MB. I still want to pick that game up at some point but the price still hasn't fell far enough for me to justify it. From what I've heard it's a fun if very lean experience.

But DVD's by nature are standard-def devices. They weren't made for HD content. It's the reason why Blu-Ray and HD DVD were created for HD movies. If it was feasible to put HD movies on standard DVD's then the movie companies would have done that. Putting an HD game onto a standard DVD is even worse, because all the textures, audio, etc. have to be greatly compressed to fit on the disc, and the end result is sub-par by HD standards.

With HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, everything can be dumped on the disc with minimal compression (not as much compression as on a standard DVD). Microsoft made the mistake by not adopting an HD disc format for their Xbox 360 games. Now they're stuck using normal DVD until the next Xbox comes out, but they won't be using standard DVD next-gen, I guarantee that.

Sony helped create Blu-Ray for a reason, because they knew that in the future, HD media (games and movies) would require larger disc capacity. Nintendo is doing the same thing with the Wii U.

Now I wonder why isn't the music industry adopting HD discs for music albums?

Sony wanted money and knew DVD couldn't last forever (which everyone knew). Almost every current gen games looks and sounds the same on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the audio and video are pretty much the same. The only real difference is how much data can be stored.

tendo, the music industry has been using BD for years. It's called BD-Audio (here is one BD-Audio disc: http://www.amazon.com/Damn-The-Torpedoes-Blu-ray-Audio/dp/B0042KZJ50/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349904875&sr=8-1&keywords=BD-Audio). The thing is that they are pretty niche, just like SACD's are.

So watching HD movies and playing HD games are accepted as standard these days, but HD audio is still niche? Why? People demanded better visual quality for their movies and games, so why not music as well?

It's much harder to tell the difference in audio quality unless you have a expensive (read: several hundred dollars) sound system. And even then, the difference isn't as big as HD video. Essentially, you  need a TV, Blu-ray Disc player, and expensive sound system just to tell the difference in audio quality. Only audiophiles will even care, most people will prefer just downloading the MP3 (which sounds good too). Price for the discs is another reason too. Would you prefer to pay $5 for the CD version of the album (http://www.amazon.com/Damn-Torpedoes-Remastered-Petty-Heartbreakers/dp/B0042KZJ5A/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1349906660&sr=1-1&keywords=Damn+The+Torpedoes) or $27 for the BD-Audio version?

Price didn't stop people from buying expensive HDTV's a few years back. And maybe they'll make Blu-Ray music players (akin to CD players)...

You use TV's more often and for more stuff.

And the problem isn't audio players for it (BD players are more and more common), the problem is you need an expensive audio system to tell the difference between an MP3 and BD-Audio.

Or kick-ass headphones.

Either way, you would need to spend several hundred dollars on audio equipment to notice any real improvement.

True. But isn't that the same with TVs too?

Wasn't Animal Crossing for GC ridiculously small? Like a few dozens of Mbs...

Not really. Even on a small, cheap TV, the difference between something like 480i and 720p is noticeable. It's true that the difference between 1080p and 2K or 4K is negligible though because of the limitations of the human eye.


azeke, it was small enough that you could take the disc out of the GameCube and keep playing because the entire game could fit in the GameCube's memory.

It was basically a recompiled N64 game.