We all know about Cyberpunk 2077. Don’t pretend you haven’t heard of it. The trailers, the awards show appearances, the endless fanfare. It’s dominated the gaming sphere for years now. And now that the cat is finally out of the bag we can see that it did not live up to its promise. Where did Cyberpunk go wrong? And how could Polish studio CD Projekt Red learn from its mistakes?
Cyberpunk led its marketing campaign with very big promises. A stunningly large game, many times larger than anything anybody had seen before. So grand in scale that you wouldn’t be able to see the end of it. So going in, many gamers were expecting the game to take up at least five hundred gigabytes. It would only make sense that such a supposedly immense game would do so. But Cyberpunk unfortunately fell very short, clocking in at a measly sixty-three gigabytes, give or take. And in the world of modern video games, this certainly cannot be called “big”.
2020 has seen the release of games that tower over that of Cyberpunk. The long awaited newest installment in the Half-Life series, Half-Life: Alyx, comes in at sixty-seven gigabytes. A small lead over Cyberpunk, but the first of many. Demon’s Souls for the PlayStation 5: sixty-six gigabytes. The Last of Us Part II: seventy-eight gigabytes. But these are all small potatoes, you know? These games are a little bit bigger. But don’t fret, dear reader, because 2020 has delivered into our starving, ravenous mouths some of the biggest games in history.
Those games previously mentioned are bigger. The comparative. But Cyberpunk 2077 promised to be the biggest. The superlative. And it has very clearly and egregiously failed to live up to this promise. One hot button topic in gaming was the size of a recent title: Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Let’s recall for a moment Cyberpunk’s file size: sixty-three gigabytes. Ladies and gentlemen, imagine that that data is but a pebble. A measly little rock. And Cold War is a boulder towering over it at an astonishing one hundred and twenty-five gigabytes on release. Unprecedented. A flat-out masterful display from Treyarch.
And you must be thinking “Wow, what a huge game. Certainly much bigger than those layabouts at CD Projekt Red could produce!” And let me stop you right there. Because yes, Call of Duty has given us an absolutely massive game, and we are all the better for it. But that boulder that is Cold War, is nothing compared to our final contender. No, in comparison this titan is Mount Vesuvius, absolutely dwarfing Cold War. And that title is Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020).
Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series had small beginnings. The initial release in November of 1982 was just over one hundred kilobytes. Chump change, and we all knew Microsoft could do better. And they did. With each successive release all the way from the 80s to 2020, Microsoft has made their games bigger and bigger. Culminating in the towering achievement that is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. This beast, this absolute behemoth of a video game, comes in at one hundred and fifty gigabytes. By a long shot, the biggest game out of the bunch. No other company has the time, the resources, and most importantly, the moxie to challenge Microsoft’s shining achievement.
2020 was the year that Cyberpunk said it was going to go big. And it is plain to see that they completely and totally failed in this endeavor. In this world if you want to wow your consumers, to truly stand out, you have to stick to those promises. You have to truly be the biggest. And when it comes to the size game, CD Projekt Red simply can’t perform.
