Sizes Bigger Than a Terabyte
As gamers and collectors of digital content, we deal with large file sizes all the time. But terabytes are just the beginning when it comes to truly massive data. For game companies and content producers to create stunningly complex and realistic future game worlds, we‘ll need to upsize far beyond the terabyte. Here‘s a look at the enormous levels of data storage required for the ultimate future of gaming:
Petabyte – 1000 TB
Today‘s most detailed game environments and assets, like those seen in recent cinematic titles such as The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption, clock in around 100 GB or .1 TB. So building detailed open worlds of 1000x more data pushes us into the petabyte range (1 quadrillion bytes). But amazingly, this is just where we are headed. Industry leaders like Epic estimate game install sizes could reach the 1 petabyte range soon. This would allow for immense, highly dynamic worlds to explore.
Exabyte (1 Billion GB) – The Open Metaverse
Tech visionaries imagine open, dynamic metaverse environments with almost limitless detail and population. These true-to-life digital worlds could ultimately constitute billions of terabytes or exabytes of data. Every asset, character and interaction would be modeled – plus the histories and behavior data for billions of simultaneous users. This data-intensive view of the metaverse still lives largely in concept videos (see Ready Player One, etc) – exabyte-range computing power and infrastructure will remain astronomical for the foreseeable future. But with time, experts see this amount of data capacity as an eventual destination.
Zettabyte (1 Trillion TB) – 175 ZB By 2025
While exabyte-scale open metaverse environments remain theoretical, the world‘s information overall is quickly scaling up. It is estimated by reliable sources that collectively, humanity‘s data output will reach 175 billion terabytes (zettabytes) by 2025. This staggering estimate includes traditional file storage as well all data transmitted – images, video, location data, and more. Games and interactive media will certainly contribute to a large share of such data. Imagine the amount of collective player data from increasingly sophisticated, always-online games by that time! 175 zettabytes is a number still hard to fully grasp – but it marks our trajectory.
Yottabyte (1 Trillion ZB) – Theoretical Future
Finally, the maximum defined data unit – the yottabyte or one septillion bytes – remains a theoretical benchmark at the largest scale. As exponential data growth continues, yottabyte processing power will one day be required to operate and archive humanity‘s ever-expanding knowledge base and interactive worlds. But that immense scale likely won‘t be reached for decades or longer. With gamers and content creators leading the charge in terms of computing demands and data creation, we‘ll be eagerly awaiting each upsized future milestone together!
