Those who love comic book heroes and having some really impressive powers may have fallen in love with the inFAMOUS series. Assuming the role of Cole MacGrath grants players the ability of using lighting to fight off hordes of enemies in Empire City. On June 7, Cole made his second stint into the video gaming world as inFAMOUS 2 hit store shelves. However, gamers won’t need to drive over to the store to buy it as now the full game is available on the Playstation Network. Be warned, the size of the download is as big as the action contained within the game.
If you are interested in downloading and buying inFAMOUS 2, you better leave 15GB of space left on your hard drive. You read it correctly. The game is 15GB. That is quite a lot of space simply for one game.
Those who downloaded the first inFAMOUS as part of the Welcome Back program would find that it only took up a little over 7GB of space. That would make the second title over twice the size of Cole’s debut on the PS3.
There has been a lot of talk about wanting to make the industry totally digital, removing the need to go to a retailer to buy games much like the music industry is making that shift with the likes of iTunes. But with download sizes as large as 15GB, one would have to question how much larger can it get from here?
L.A. Noire was quite a handful to deal with, considering the original game took up a total of 6 DVD discs on the XBox 360 but had content removed to reduce the total to 3. If that game wound up making a fully-loaded Blu-ray disc, then that game would be in the neighborhood of a 25GB download if L.A. Noire were to be sold via digital download.
We can only expect that the downloads will get bigger within the next generation of consoles, but as to how much remains to be seen. If the industry wants to move in a totally digital direction, then hard drives would have to be considerably larger with 250GB be the smallest size to offer. This would inevitably raise the costs of consoles even if they don’t feature a disc player in some form.
The other problem with this is bandwidth. Depending on where one lives, the available bandwidth will vary by ISP (internet service provider) and other factors such as location, number of people in the living space, etc. Not to mention, these downloads can take up a lot of space on one’s bandwidth cap, making it more difficult to purchase multiple titles as they could end up taking most, if not all, of the cap.
With downloads as large as inFAMOUS 2, the industry, and the internet as a whole, is not ready to sustain a fully digital world. The internet still needs to be a bit faster so that these large downloads won’t take so long. The bandwidth cap also will need to see a major increase to accomodate for another industry going the digital route, as movies and music have already gone that way and TV is becoming more popular on the web. If the internet expands its reaches and size, then digital downloads for games will become much more feasible, but I think we are years away before we can get to that point.
