XBLA games won't get bigger than 2GB

by Richard Mitchell on Sep 24th 2009 7:30PM

Those that downloaded Red Alert 3: Commander's Challenge may have noticed that the game is huge for an Xbox Live Arcade title, weighing in at 2.1GB. Over the years, XBLA games have gotten bigger and bigger, with Microsoft slowly making exceptions to the size limitation rule so that important releases could ... well, release. Now that size limit is, for all intents and purposes, gone. At the same time, XBLA games can't get any bigger than two gigabytes. Confused?

Scott Austin, Microsoft's director of digital games, told IGN that the XBLA system actually can't accept anything larger than 2GB. Some may be tempted to cry foul, as Microsoft already offers significantly larger downloads with its Games on Demand service. However, according to Austin, Games on Demand uses a different file structure.

We'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Commander's Challenge is slightly above two gigabytes (while it's listed as 2GB on Xbox.com, it shows up as 2.1GB on the 360 HDD). We've sent this little puzzle to Microsoft, in hopes that we might get some more concrete details. We'll update this post when such details arrive.

Source

Tags: business, Microsoft, xbla, xblm, Xbox-360, xbox-live, xbox-live-arcade

Reader Comments (68)

It probably has something to do with the whole 1024=1000 file structure crap. Like how my HD drive is 320 gigs but windows only reads it as 298 gigs.

But I could be wrong and doesn't mean squat

Does that have something to do with why my PS3 says the HDD is 74 instead of 80GB?

i thought that PS3s say it has 6GB missing because it has system files on the HDD...

i'm not 100% sure, but i believe that's because every HDD has to be formatted, which inherently takes up some of the space. any external drive you purchase for a computer is the same as well.

(1024=1000)+Formatting=Never being able to tell exactly how much space is on your HD.

What you're talking about isn't that 1024=1000 it's because of how base-8 works.

Also, the fact you're missing gigglebytes is because of of the MFT and boot sectors taking up more space, and the larger the drive the more space they take up.

The PS3 system files are loaded on the firmware I believe, which is why each update is a few hundred megs, so I do not believe there is much space taken up for the PS3 system files as opposed to the xbox dashboard being run off the drive and having much more bite-size updates.

I'm not exactly sure what your talking about Kev with base-8 since from what I understand computers use base-16 (hexadecimal) which fundamentaly came from a base-2 sytem (binary).

However, I do know that Windows reads a Gigabyte as 1 048 576 bytes (1024 x 1024) but most HD manufacturers Gigabyte means 1 000 000 bytes, hence why Windows reads less gigs than what the HD is. The same space is there, just read differently.

The MFT space is still included in the total space of the drive so this isn't a factor of missing gigabytes.

But than again I might be an idiot and making shit up.

Welcome to the world fo metric.

1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte
1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte.

Computer binary (base 2) doesn't play nice with that system. Closest you have is 2^10 which = 1024.

Hence the attempt to adapt metric to the world of computers:
1024 bytes = 1 Kilobyte.

Hard drive companies use the 1000 bytes = 1 KB when they advertise the size of their drives. It is legal because it is technically correct even though comptuers don't use the space that way.

Your comptuter reports size based on 1024 bytes = 1KB. You "lose" 24 bytes for every KB of drive space. when you get to Gigabytes this number begins to become significant.

To avoid confusion it was suggested that the non-metric terms kibibytes, mebibytes, and gibibytes be used when using binary systems. This has not been widely accepted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibytes

It's more than the 'loose' 24 in 1024 that you're referring to, you have to keep in mind some of the firmware and other stuff that always has to reside on an HDD. I use to work for a mfg of SAN disk arrays, and it's always a different amount of actual storage space set aside depending upon the drive type.

for ex., the 146gb enterprise drives we use to use were actually around 130ish, and the 750gb SATA drives were about 700ish.

This would actually make perfect sense if XBLA were on the computer definition of a Gigabyte (which actually is a Gibabyte, or 1,073,741,824 bytes) and Microsoft's Xbox were on a marketing definition of a Gigabyte (1,000,000 bytes). A maximum-sized game would then be 2,147,483,648 bytes, which would read to most computers as exactly 2 GB, and to marketing droids as 2.14 GB.

Serious nerd overload!!

Remember how XBLA games werent supposed to be bigger than 50 MB?

Yeaaaah,....

MS just quit committing highway robbery on your custom hard drives, then who the hell cares how big downloadable games are?

i don't really think it's MS's fault that games are getting bigger, it's just that more intricate, lengthier games with better graphics tend to have more memory, and if anything, that's on developers. i don't really consider the release of games like trials HD and shadow complex to be "highway robbery." if MS fails to provide adequate ways for Arcade users to access that material, that's one thing, but it seems weird to fault them for releasing good content.

@David

Whoa man, you totally misread his comment. He was talking about how MS charges too damn much for their proprietary hard drives, which is what he was referring to as "highway robbery". it had nothing to do with the bs you were talking about.

ah, nevermind. in that case, i'm 100% in agreement, those hard drives are way overprices......but what accessory from MS isn't?

No worries Dave, we cool.

In other words: Xbox 360 Arcade is the worst choice to buy.

the only accessories that are not overpriced are the controllers, webcam ($10 with you're in the movies bundle), and the remotes.

Everything else (hard drivers, headsets, wireless, etc) are ripping us off.

What ever happened to downloading games in parts and using a client to put them together?

And torrents.

and split .zip files.

All PSP games are under 2GB. PSP games are awesome.

I'm positive XBLA can fit awesome games in under 2GB of space.

ZUNE portable gaming system confirmed!!!

Last time I checked PSP games weren't 1080p, with HD audio etc.

Well, if you want to get technical, almost all "1080p" Xbox games are just upscaled from 720p...

If you want to be technical a bit more:

360 games have more and higher resolution texture files. 360 games have less higher bitrates on audio. Display resolution doesn't mean much. Look at PC games. Nexuiz, which is under 1GB, has more advanced bump mapping techniques and can hit resolutions far higher than any 360 game (uses offset maps, which is more advanced than the uncommon parallax maps that are in a select few games, Gears being one). Yet it is still under 1GB. What takes up space are media files and textures, not just game code. And, I'm pretty sure game code probably doesn't take that much to begin with, but I don't know exactly.

Curse me!

"Less higher" is just meant to be "higher." I forgot to remove the less from my original sentence when I revised it...

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...

Yes, and PSP games are supposed to be full "retail" releases, and I believe Xbox has a mechanism for distributing those games as well.

You say that now.

Give em 3 months >_>

Reminds me of Nintendo's handling of Mortal Kombat:
Nintendo's version: Censored. Sega's version: Uncensored.
Sega's version of Mortal Kombat doubles sales of Nintendo's version.
All versions of Mortal Kombat II: Uncensored.

I remember back when I had a SNES I wanted Mortal Combat, but my mom heard about the blood and gore and wouldn't let me get it. I told her that the SNES version was censored and the Genesis version had the blood and gore, but she wouldn't believe me. I did always get to play it at a friend's house who had a Genesis.

Sometime in the year 2056 - Xbox Live 9000 Pro EX games won't get bigger than 160GB

Oh, it's not over 9000...

When Brian Boitano went to the year 3010, he beat up the evil robot king and saved the human race again.

5.1TB of Windows 20

If what he's said is true, that means that the XBLA hardware is formatted FAT32, which has a physical limit of 2GB per file. If that's true, that's atrocious.

Its not FAT or NTFS.

It uses its own special format

FAIL. Not to mention FAT32's limit is 4GB not 2GB.

Yeah, more like FAT16.

I formatted my external HD to NTFS from FAT and since then it hasn't worked to play media on my 360.

So who knows, maybe it does work on a FAT based system...

Does anyone with actual understanding of this want to weigh in?
Cause im just guessing

They are probably not using FAT or NTFS but are instead doign something similar to sharepoint and storing the whole "file system" within a database.

Then some genius when designing the DB set the blob field for the binary data to be a signed 32-bit field, which reserves 1 bit to specify the number as negative or positive.

Now why you would want to have a negative file size is anyones guess.

But 2^31 is 2,147,483,648 which rounds to about 2.2GiB.

and scribblenaut, I am also just guessing :)

Microsoft has seen the 4GB of RAM limitation for years, yet only now is making a real effort to push beyond it. Similarly, their implementation of NTFS and FAT have always more or less *just barely* supported the largest hard drives currently available: I remember struggling to install a version of XP on an 80 GB HDD, because the XP installer I had was 2 years old and only supported a maximum HDD size of 30GB at the time. Microsoft hasn't exactly been great about future-proofing their technology allocations.

Which is to say, if they were implementing a system with an intended maximum file size of 50MB, it actually sounds downright reasonable to implement it with a 2GB file size limit. At least, it sounds reasonable as a step for a company whose flagship product is still using the concept of a registry.

We're talking computers here and I wouldn't be surprised if the limit in the code was set to 2 gig becasuse "games will never be that large". Remeber that 20 years ago computer programmers missed the fact that the millenium was going to end.

Perhaps a merger of games-on-demand and XBLA would be in order? Merge them into one thing and let the 360 decide where to download it from depending on the size?

Bullshit.

Also, I have a feeling that my post isn't exactly offering a new opinion on this news.

You can't question the future. It's like if I said to you in 1991. In the he future they'll have XBLA and you'd say. That makes no sense. WTF is that? Same thing here. There's a reason it has 9000 in the title. We just don't know why...yet.

But it's not 1991. And I know exactly what XBLA is.

didnt we have Sega.net in 1991? because I thought that was the future, unfortunately I didn't have 30$/month :(

Exactly!

I don't mean to be a bugger about it, but all I could think when I read this was, "so what?" For one, why would Microsoft care what the max size of a game is? And for two, why would we care if there's a cap on game size or not? I'm obviously missing something here.

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XBLA games won't get bigger than 2GB

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