I am new to unreal engine and recently downloaded unreal engine 5. When I began work on my first game, I did so without starter content as I wanted to add only what I needed as I needed it. I downloaded 14 materials and by checked the game file size of out sheer curiosity. The game was already 11.8 Gb with 9.5 of those being from the 14 materials from Megascans. Is this normal? If so, how? the engine itself is only 20 Gbs, how are 14 texture nearly half of that. Furthermore, how can I expect my game to be playable on any hardware? I have no animations, static meshes, or landscapes; how large can I expect the game to be after adding any of those? Can anyone offer advice, insight, or solutions?
Don’t use megascans stuff 
They are at a RIDICULOUS resolution. I have some rock packs which use crafty material programming rather than photo realism. You can scale them to a huge size, and walk right up and put your nose on them, and they look fine.
A lot of photo scanned stuff doesn’t look as good as well programmed stuff, in my opinion.
1 Like
Textures take up a ton of space, it’s not uncommon for AAA games to have separate 25gb downloads for the full/high resolution textures.
If you can, stick to 2k textures for the vast majority of assets, and use/reuse detail normal and textures to add more detail where you need it. Avoid baked/unique textures where you can, and use tiling/trim textures instead.
Also packing textures and oodle compression saves a bunch of disk space.
1 Like
Thanks for the advice