it only takes up 3.8 gigs of my storage space on my 360

and then theres Saints row 3 which is currently my biggest space taker of 7.0 gigs i dont even have any title updates or DLC for that game!

BSA file format.

But some people will start saying 11.11.11.

That's fine, I'd be mad if it was 8 gigs without how everything handled in game fits well with A mile Wide, but a foot Deep.

anyway compression prowess and all that stuff, is more likely the reason why. Saints row has alot of VA, Cinematic, Options...that alone warrants its size > Skyrim.

The textures takes up a lot and considering the terrible resolution on the 360 then that might explain it. the PC version is quite a bit larger, not to mention the 3 gig HD texture pack bethesda released for free

Because Bethesda are bros and have great compression methods.

Many different factors can make two games be "different size" even when their actual content is equal (or opposite).

Like..... texture sizes & compression (the same barrel can take more or less file space, for instance). Or cutscenes & voice files (a game with lots of FMV & voice will take up more space than one with less). Etc, etc, etc.

Rage, for example - not nearly as much "content" as the average Beth game. But it uses a wacky new "megatexture" system that's supposed to (really depends on your hardware) be prettier. Lots of voice, too. Takes 20+GB.

I think he's been answered nicely

Because it's a grower, not a shower.

Rather the format for esm and esp files, but yeah. The format they use allow to build very large game worlds with fairly small amounts of data space, it's very efficient that way. For other games the game world data generally take up a lot more space.

BSA files aren't really anything special, more like an uncompressed zip file or something. It's just something they use to bring a lot of smaller files (which are already compressed) together to one larger file (as it's quite a bit faster to just deal and read one large file compared to many small ones).

The main thing that take up space for Skyrim are the voices and the textures, and they can both be compressed quite a bit. Especially the textures as they aren't really that large to begin with for the console versions due RAM limitations. The 3GB texture patch raise the RAM requirements for the PC version tremendously.

Man I wish it only took up 3.8 gigs on my PC. After the initial 10 for vanilla plus dawnguard and now all the mods I've installed I'm sitting at a good 25 gigs or so.