We’ve all been there. You finally decide to revisit Los Santos, or maybe you’ve just picked up the latest AAA blockbuster on a Steam sale, and then you see it: the dreaded “120GB required” notification. Your SSD, already groaning under the weight of four other games and a library of “work” files you haven’t touched since 2024, simply gives up. According to Telset, a Brazilian modder recently decided that enough was enough, performing a feat of digital surgery that sounds more like black magic than coding. He managed to squeeze the behemoth that is Grand Theft Auto V down to a measly 2.5GB.
Think about that for a second. That is a 98% reduction in size. It’s the equivalent of taking a massive, three-story mansion and somehow folding it into a carry-on suitcase. While the result isn’t exactly “pretty” in the traditional sense, it’s a radical experiment that forces us to ask a very uncomfortable question: Why are we letting game developers colonize our hard drives like this?
The modder, who goes by the handle Goodly, shared his progress on X late last year, and it immediately sent ripples through the community. He didn’t just zip the files and hope for the best. This was a deep, aggressive deconstruction of what makes a game a game. He went into the file architecture and started cutting away anything that wasn’t strictly necessary for the game to boot and function. Audio files? Gone, mostly. High-resolution textures? Deleted. Cinematic cutscenes? Tossed into the digital void. What remained was a skeletal, low-poly version of Rockstar’s masterpiece that still, somehow, worked.
The bloated reality of modern game development
It’s easy to dismiss Goodly’s experiment as a curiosity, a “can it run” stunt similar to people putting Doom on a pregnancy test. But there’s a deeper point here. For the last decade, we’ve been living in an era of “lazy” storage management. As SSD prices dropped and internet speeds increased—at least in major metropolitan hubs—developers stopped worrying about the “fat.”
According to a 2024 Statista report, the average size of a top-tier AAA game has increased by over 400% since 2013. We went from 20GB being “huge” to 150GB being “standard.” And for what? Often, it’s for 4K textures that 80% of the player base isn’t even using because they’re still playing on 1080p monitors. It’s for uncompressed audio files that offer marginal gains in fidelity but take up tens of gigabytes. It feels like the industry has collectively decided that our storage space is an infinite resource they’re entitled to use.
And let’s be real, the “optimization” we’re promised usually feels like a PR buzzword. When a game like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption 2 lands on your drive, it’s not just taking up space; it’s holding your hardware hostage. You have to delete three other games just to make room for one update. It’s a war of attrition where the loser is always the consumer’s wallet and patience.
“We are reaching a point where the size of a game is becoming a barrier to entry, not just a technical requirement. If a player has to wait three days to download a game, they’ve already lost interest before the title screen.”
— Mark Darrah, Former BioWare Executive (Industry Discussion, 2024)
Goodly’s 2.5GB version of GTA V is, in many ways, a protest. It shows that the core logic of the game—the physics, the AI, the world-building—is actually quite small. The rest is just “chrome.” Beautiful, shiny chrome, sure, but chrome nonetheless. When you strip away the 4K ripples on the water and the high-fidelity engine roars, you’re left with the soul of the game, and it turns out that soul fits on a cheap thumb drive from 2010.
The digital divide and the cost of “standard” gaming
There’s a social angle here that we don’t talk about enough. We often assume everyone has a 1Gbps fiber connection and a 2TB NVMe drive. But that’s a very privileged perspective. A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that roughly 24% of adults in rural areas still lack high-speed broadband at home. For these players, a 120GB download isn’t a minor inconvenience; it’s a week-long project that might actually exceed their monthly data cap.
By refusing to optimize or provide modular installation options, developers are effectively gatekeeping their games. If you live in a region with slow internet or high data costs, you’re being told that modern gaming isn’t for you. This is why the Brazilian modding scene is so vibrant—they are often working out of necessity, finding ways to make technology work in environments where “unlimited everything” isn’t the norm.
Goodly’s work highlights that the “unnecessary” files he deleted—the high-res assets and extra audio—are the very things that create this barrier. If a developer offered a “low-spec” download option that was only 10GB or 20GB, they would suddenly open their market to millions of players who are currently being squeezed out by the size of the files.
Is the 2.5GB version of GTA V actually playable?
Technically, yes, it boots and you can drive around. However, it’s a “proof of concept.” The textures are extremely blurry, there’s almost no sound, and the world feels empty because so many assets have been removed to save space. It’s not meant for a standard playthrough.
Why don’t developers just use better compression?
Compression requires CPU power to decompress in real-time. Developers often leave files uncompressed to reduce the load on the processor, ensuring smoother frame rates. It’s a trade-off between disk space and performance.
A future of modularity?
So, where do we go from here? We can’t expect every game to be 2GB, nor would we want them to be. We love the cinematic scores and the hyper-realistic lighting. But there has to be a middle ground. We’re starting to see it with some titles. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, for all its faults, eventually introduced a modular system where you could uninstall the campaign but keep the multiplayer, or vice versa.
But that should be the floor, not the ceiling. Imagine a future where, upon clicking “Install,” you get a checklist. Do you want 4K textures? (No, I’m on a laptop). Do you want the high-fidelity audio pack? (No, I use cheap earbuds). Do you want the multi-language pack? (No, just English). By making games modular, developers could easily cut file sizes in half for a huge portion of their audience.
The success of cloud gaming last year was partly driven by this very issue. People are tired of managing their storage like a Tetris board. They’d rather stream the game than deal with a 150GB footprint. But cloud gaming has its own latency issues and requires—you guessed it—perfect internet. It’s not a silver bullet.
The real solution is a return to the discipline of the past. Back when storage was expensive, developers were wizards of optimization. They found ways to reuse assets, compress data, and make every kilobyte count. Today, that discipline has been replaced by the “just buy a bigger drive” mentality. Goodly’s 2.5GB experiment is a reminder that the wizardry is still possible; the industry just needs the will to use it.
As we look toward the next generation of games—including the inevitable launch of the next Grand Theft Auto—we should be demanding more than just better graphics. We should be demanding better respect for our hardware. Because at the rate we’re going, we won’t need new consoles for better graphics; we’ll need them just to have enough room to turn the damn thing on.
And maybe, just maybe, developers could take a page out of a Brazilian modder’s book and realize that sometimes, less really is more. Or at the very least, less is a lot easier on our SSDs.
This article is sourced from various news outlets. Analysis and presentation represent our editorial perspective.
