The State of PC Game Requirements

In 2010 the average game recommended just 2.7 GB of RAM. By 2025 that figure had climbed to 16.4 GB — right up against the 16 GB that most gaming PCs ship with. The minimum spec rose in lockstep, from under 2 GB to over 10 GB, so even the floor now assumes a modern machine.

The jump isn’t smooth — it steps up whenever a new console generation resets the baseline (note the 2013 and 2020–2021 inflections). But the direction never reverses. If the trend holds, 32 GB becomes the mainstream recommendation before the end of the decade.

Average recommended install size grew from about 11 GB in 2010 to a peak of 55 GB in 2023. High-fidelity textures and uncompressed audio are the main culprits — and that’s an average. The heaviest modern releases ask for 100–180 GB apiece.

For years an SSD was a nice-to-have. Then it became a requirement almost overnight. No game in our set named an SSD before 2013; by 2024, 36% did, and in 2025 it’s 40%. The steep climb from 12% (2022) to 40% (2025) is the clearest “hard cutover” in the whole dataset — driven by streaming-asset engines that a hard drive simply can’t feed fast enough.

Not every genre is equally demanding. Racing (11.7 GB), MMOs (10.4 GB) and simulation games (9.9 GB) top the table — physics, streaming worlds and huge draw distances cost memory. Strategy games, which lean on the CPU more than the GPU, are the lightest of the major genres.

For all the growth at the top end, the long tail is reassuring: 33% of games in our catalog still recommend 4 GB or less, and another 39% ask for only 6–8 GB. If you’re on older or budget hardware, the majority of PC games are still within reach.

Not sure where your machine lands? See games that run on 4 GB, the best for 8 GB, or low-end PC picks.

Only a handful of games recommend 32 GB of RAM today — but the list is growing, and it reads like a who’s-who of 2023–2025 releases. Click any title to check it against your own hardware.