Storage space may be cheaper these days, but game installs have ballooned to match. When games routinely take up more than 100 GB, you do find yourself wondering how soon you’ll be able to uninstall each one to free up that space. The multiplayer fad of the moment will fade, and you’ll either finish or get sick of that open world game at some point. What’s your personal Deletion Protocol, and what game’s next on the chopping block?
Nick Evanson, Hardware Writer: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Stalker 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered. Storage is cheap! I have a 2 TB SSD just for my Steam library and another one for my Epic and Ubisoft libraries. As things currently stand, the former has 1.35 TBs worth of games on it and the latter has 360 GBs of games (plus 1 TB or so of other apps).
Admittedly, I also have an uncapped 1 Gb net connection so downloading 150+ GB games isn’t a problem. It wasn’t all that long ago when I was on a 25 Mbps connection and any game over 50 GB in size was a ‘leave it downloading overnight’ job.
Chris Livingston, Senior Editor: I honestly don’t keep a lot of games installed and I’ll tell you why: Uninstalling Steam games is a real pleasure. Let me explain.
First, I don’t like it when Steam games update themselves without my say-so, because screw you, Steam. I make the decisions around here. So I set all of my games to “Wait until I launch the game.” This means that instead of auto-updating, a new patch for a game will turn the title blue in my library and say something like “Update Queued.” After a few weeks of me ignoring everything, pretty much my entire library will be demanding an update, at which point I usually get stressed out by the sheer number of updates awaiting my attention and go through the library, deleting every blue title on the list. Ahhh… no more angry blue titles in my library. No more stress. Perfect.
(Image credit: Larian)
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: I think Chris is on to something there, but I’m also a prepper when it comes to data and the media I really care about—what if the ‘net goes down without impacting my material quality of life in any significant way, and I still want to play the games I love? I feel like I’m going to be a home server guy someday, but for now I just buy a new NVMe drive every few years when I’m feeling cramped.
As for the question, this is embarrassing. The biggest game I currently have installed is Stalker 2 at 155 gigs, which I still have not played, but I hear it’s pretty good . Worth it or not, TBD. Second place is Baldur’s Gate 3 at 147 gigs and 420 hours played to date. Definitely worth it.
(Image credit: Sega)
Shaun Prescott, AU Editor: The largest game I have installed at the moment is Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, which comes it at 55.16 GB. For games north of 50 GB, I delete them as soon as I’ve finished them.
The big games are easy to deal with—it’s the small games that give me anxiety. My drive is mostly taken up by 300MB–1 GB indie games that I will never delete because deleting them won’t make a significant difference when trying to make space for, say, Stalker 2. But all those tiny games add up. Am I ever going to play To the Moon again? Probably not, but what’s the harm in 176.88 MB?
(Image credit: Insomniac Games, Nixxes Software)
Morgan Park, Staff Writer: Fascinating to see everybody’s Deletion Protocols. My process for deciding what stays or goes is less formal, but consistent: I ask “Am I gonna play this again soon?” and make the tough call.
Just a few days ago, the biggest game on my drive was Spider-Man 2 (90 GB+), a game I already played on PS5 and hadn’t returned to on PC in over two weeks. It was time to admit I wasn’t gonna finish that playthrough. That’s left me with five games between 60–80GB right now: Helldivers 2, Rainbow Six Siege, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and Marvel Rivals. Four out of five of those are multiplayer games that friends want to play fairly often, so it’s rare that I ever delete them.
(Image credit: Croteam)
Andy Chalk, US News Lead: Number one on the chart is Talos Principle 2, at 103 GB. Next is Cyberpunk 2077 at 85.6 GB, which I haven’t been able to bring myself to uninstall despite finishing it weeks ago, then Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Generation Zero, which I play with a pal, and Serious Sam 4, which I may play with a pal at some point in the future.
Like Shaun, I have a ton of small games installed, some of which I haven’t touched for years, because one never knows when the urge will strike and it’s not like deleting them is going to make a difference anyway, right? (Don’t do the math, if I wanted someone to add them up for me I’d ask.)
I struggle more with deleting biggish games I really like. Cyberpunk, Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodhunt, the new System Shock, Cloudpunk, Pacific Drive, and a host of others are just sitting there sucking up gobs of space, long after I’ve stopped playing them. Do they deserve it? Hey, it’s less psychologically taxing than choosing who stays and who goes. (Less effort, too.)
(Image credit: GSC Game World)
Joshua Wolens, News Writer: Clocking in at 153 GB, mine’s Stalker 2, which still lingers on my SSD from when I reviewed it back in November. To be honest, I’ve got no intention of playing it again until GSC has actually, uh, finished making it, but once it has I’ve got grand ambitions to go in there and do a ‘proper’ completionist playthrough like I would’ve done if I hadn’t had to write about the game to a deadline.
As an aside, the smallest game on there is Uplink, an absolute all-timer, at 20 MB. They don’t make ’em like they used to.
