The Solution to Grand Theft Auto 6's Biggest Problem Is This 2.5GB Nightmare

Yet, somehow, the core systems still function. You can still use cheat codes. You can still fire weapons. You can still jump out of a plane with a parachute. It's not playable in any traditional sense, and the modders clearly weren't trying to create something people would actually sit down and enjoy. The point was to answer a question: how far can you strip a 120GB open-world game before it stops being a game at all?

The answer, apparently, is pretty far.

Now, nobody is suggesting that Rockstar should ship Grand Theft Auto 6 at 2.5GB. That would be absurd. But this experiment comes at a particularly interesting time, because the cost of storing video games on your hardware is about to become a much bigger deal than it has been in years, and the gaming industry's tendency toward file-size bloat has never been more relevant.

The AI boom has turned the storage market upside down. If you've tried to buy an SSD in the past few months, you've probably noticed something unpleasant happening to the prices. Hard drives are getting hit too. HDD prices have risen by an average of 46% between September 2025 and January 2026, according to ThinkComputers.org, driven by the same AI infrastructure demand that's consuming SSDs.

We've covered this exact problem in the context of console hardware. The AI-driven RAM shortage is already threatening to push console prices higher, and Sony had to stockpile memory modules in advance just to guarantee there would be enough PS5 units on shelves for GTA 6's November 19, 2026, launch. If you're still on the fence about buying a PS5 Pro, the window is narrowing precisely because of the supply chain pressure, although Sony reassures that a price hike isn't coming anytime soon.

This is the environment that modern games are shipping into, and the file sizes keep getting bigger.

GTA V launched on PC in 2015 at 65GB. Through years of Grand Theft Online updates, it has ballooned to roughly 120GB. The GTA V compression mod is obviously an extreme case. Nobody wants to play a version of Los Santos where the protagonist looks like a store mannequin and the frame rate makes a slideshow look smooth. But there's a less extreme version of this idea that actually has legs, and it already exists within GTA V's own modding community.

GTA V Re-Sized is a mod that compresses the game's texture files to significantly smaller sizes without visibly losing quality, and it's been allowing players with lower-end graphics cards to run the game at high settings for years. It's proof that smart compression can achieve meaningful file size reductions without turning the game into an unrecognizable mess.

For PC players, that might just mean buying another drive. But with SSD prices having nearly doubled and showing no signs of coming back down anytime soon, "just buy more storage" isn't the casual suggestion it used to be. For console players on PS5 or Xbox Series X, a 150GB+ install means GTA 6 alone would consume roughly 20% of usable storage. Add a couple of other major titles, and you're constantly juggling installs, which is already one of the most common complaints among current-gen console owners.

To be clear, none of this is exclusively a Rockstar problem. The entire AAA gaming industry has treated storage space as essentially free for years, because for a long time, it basically was. SSDs were getting cheaper every quarter, HDDs were practically disposable, and the cost of an extra terabyte was negligible for most consumers. That assumption no longer holds. The AI boom has fundamentally altered the economics of storage, and the ripple effects are already showing up in ways that directly impact gamers and the companies that sell to them.

What the 2.5GB GTA V mod demonstrates, in its absurd and barely functional way, is that games contain an enormous amount of data that most players never interact with. Not all of it needs to be on the drive at all times. The concept of selective downloading, where players install only the components they intend to use, shouldn't be a feature that requires a modder with a dream and a compression algorithm. It should be standard practice, especially when every gigabyte is now costing consumers meaningfully more than it did a year ago.

Rockstar hasn't said a word about the game's technical requirements and given the studio's tendency toward total silence about anything related to the game, we probably won't know how much disk space your console will need until much closer to the November launch. But if there's one thing the 2.5GB experiment proves, it's that the relationship between file size and playability isn't as fixed as the industry has led us to believe.

A 98% reduction is obviously ridiculous. But a 20% or 30% reduction achieved through smarter compression, optional asset packs, and the elimination of redundant data? That's not ridiculous at all. That's just good engineering. And in a market where every gigabyte of storage is more expensive than it's been in years, good engineering isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have.

The modders who compressed GTA V to 2.5GB didn't set out to change the industry. They set out to see what would happen if you stripped a massive game down to its absolute minimum. The answer is a barely recognizable mess that somehow still lets you fire a gun and jump out of a plane. It's funny, it's impressive in a deeply cursed way, and it's a reminder that there's probably a version of every major game that gives players what they actually need without asking them to sacrifice a quarter of their increasingly expensive hard drive to get it.