Video games are getting bigger. File sizes are growing; patches are growing (and getting more frequent); cloud gaming is more accessible than ever; and downloading games digitally, as opposed to buying them on physical discs, is now on average very much the norm. Like it or not, the future of video games is delivered in bits and bytes, rather than boxes, and there is one obvious result: a considerable increase in the amount of data this hobby requires us to download.
This is what got us wondering about the effects of gaming downloads in the first place, and is why we published our recent (very) long-read yesterday, asking: What does gaming’s all-digital future mean for the climate crisis?