Games are getting bigger in size, and not only the size of the game worlds. The actual size of a game install is getting unwieldy for a physical disc, even for UHD discs that can pack 100GB of data. In the last several years there have been numerous articles in the game press on the huge install size of modern games. PC Gamer ran an article that Call of Duty Warzone maps are running into 80GB. Optimizations and compressions can help with lazy and bloated coding, but they only go so far. Modern Warfare season 6 was so big, coming in at 375GB of data with a base install size and a patch, that it could not even fit on an Xbox Series S console and took up half the space of a PS5. For a Call of Duty gamer who owns Xbox Series S, it no longer became a question of what to uninstall to make room for Modern Warfare, it became an issue of which external hard drive to buy.

The acquisition of Weta Digital, the special effects company co-founded by Peter Jackson by a video game engine company, Unity, should not be a surprise given what video games and mainstream Hollywood films and TV shows want to achieve. Their end goals follow a similar path, that is to tell compelling stories and to immerse the audience into another universe or another life. Many films today rely on computer generated visual effects, either to save money or to film what looks like the impossible, something that modern video games have achieved for some time now.