NBA 2K24 download size is even larger than Starfield

While the arrival of Starfield was expected to take up significant hard drive space for fans, it's actually set to occupy less storage than than NBA 2K24. The NBA 2K franchise games have grown significantly in size through the last several years, but the latest release is their biggest launch day download yet.

It's easy to be confused by how a basketball sim could take up more space than an open-world Bethesda RPG, but there are a few key culprits. NBA 2K24 has a level of quality that naturally lends itself to a large game, but that's probably not the only cause.

NBA 2K24 download size defeats even Bethesda's Starfield

While download sizes vary a bit between platforms, the most clear and striking disparity between these two games comes on Xbox Series X|S. Starfield has officially launched today, and it's coming in at between 126.1 GB and 139 GB on that platform depending on reports.

That's no surprise for a massive open-world space RPG released by Bethesda. For most fans, the download size is a hopeful sign of just how massive and dense Starfield could end up being. Of course, Starfield is still behind NBA 2K24 when it comes to sheer file size.

We can confirm that NBA 2K24 comes in at a whopping 161.43 GB on Xbox Series X|S, a significant leap compared to Starfield. One massive culprit is likely the fact that NBA 2K24 will once again bring the intensely high definition graphics of their player scanning technology.

Visual Concepts uses an enormous multi-camera 3D scanning rig to get accurate scans of real-world players, and bringing that level of detail to the game for such a deep roster is bound to take lots of space. Of course, the bigger and more likely cause is a lack of optimization. With a tight yearly release cycle, optimizing and condensing file size appears to have disappeared as a priority after the jump was made to next-gen.