Storage is the real filter, not your graphics card. You are not asking whether these games are good — you already decided to try one. You are asking whether it fits, and whether it will run once it does.
I keep a 2020 laptop with a 256 GB SSD on the shelf for exactly this question. It had 31 GB free the morning I started checking these figures, which is roughly what a normal person's drive looks like after two years. Four of the five light titles below installed without me deleting a single thing. The fifth ate a third of what was left. Sizes below come from store pages and official requirement pages in September 2026 — they move with every patch, so treat them as a floor.
Four free games clear 5 GB — the fifth already wants 16
Old School RuneScape is the floor: around 200 MB, on an Intel HD 4000 chip. That integrated part shipped in 2012. Nothing else free on PC gets near it.
Four titles clear 5 GB with no asterisk. Old School RuneScape, Brawlhalla, Albion Online and MARVEL SNAP all install on a drive you would otherwise call full.
The one that breaks the pattern
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel looks like a 335 MB download on Steam. It then pulls roughly 11 GB once you finish the tutorial and pick a starter deck. Konami asks for 16 GB free.
Team Fortress 2 is the other trap. You have heard for years that it is light. Valve's own page asks for 15 GB, and mine sits closer to 22 GB after a decade of updates.
The download number is not what leaves your drive
Budget twice the download and nothing surprises you. Riot states it plainly for VALORANT: about 23 GB down, about 26 GB installed, 40 GB free recommended.
Patches unpack next to the old files before replacing them. That gap is the missing space. A drive sitting at 98% will re-download instead of patching cleanly.
Three GB you have already lost
- Steam shader pre-cache — hundreds of MB per game, several GB across a library. Steam > Settings > Downloads > Clear Shader Cache.
- Workshop subscriptions — they stay on disk after you uninstall the game itself.
- Windows page file and restore points — commonly 8 to 12 GB on a 256 GB laptop.
I cleared my own shader cache before writing this and got back a little over 3 GB. That is Brawlhalla and Albion Online, both installed, for nothing.
Shadows first: the settings order that holds 60 FPS
Drop shadow quality one notch before touching any other slider. Across game benchmarks it is the single biggest lever — worth up to roughly 20% of your frame rate, and 20 to 40 FPS in the heaviest titles.
What you give up on screen: contact shadows under characters go blocky, and distant shadows pop in nearer to you. At 1080p on a laptop panel, in motion, you will not notice.
Run them in this order
1. Shadow quality → Medium, never Ultra. Around 20% back. 2. Render or resolution scale → 90%. Another 5 to 10%, almost invisible. 3. Frame cap → your panel's refresh (60 or 144). Stops a thin laptop from thermal-throttling mid-fight. 4. Anti-aliasing → lowest or off at 1080p. Edges shimmer a little; you keep the frames. 5. Overlays off — Discord, Steam, GeForce Experience. Small, free, and it costs you nothing visually.
Do not go under 80% render scale. That is where small UI text turns to mush. In Albion Online at 75% I could not read item tooltips without leaning in.
On that same 2020 laptop, the shadow slider alone gave me back more frames than every other setting on the page put together.
Try Brawlhalla — free on PC, under 2 GB
Official page. Set shadows to Medium and cap the frame rate at your panel's refresh before your first match.
Try Brawlhalla →When a light free PC game is the wrong answer
Under 10 GB free, install nothing yet. Clear the shader cache and empty your Downloads folder first — a saturated drive stutters even in a 2 GB game.
Sitting on 16 GB and wanting a card game? Take Master Duel over MARVEL SNAP. Four times the footprint, and far more game inside it.
Three cases where size is the wrong question
- You want to play with one friend — small installs narrow the field hard; the co-op piece in this silo names the pairs that work.
- You are wary of cash-shop pressure — a 200 MB game can monetise harder than a 50 GB one. Weight tells you nothing about that.
- You want the full map — the pillar covers platforms, sizes and business models together.
Integrated graphics are fine for all four light picks. Every one of them lists 4 GB of RAM and a DirectX 10-class chip as the bar. Your machine is not the blocker here. Your drive is.
Download and storage figures from store pages and official requirement pages, September 2026. Sizes rise with every patch — treat them as a floor.
| Game | Download | Free space to keep | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old School RuneScape | ~200 MB | 1 GB | Intel HD 4000, 4 GB RAM |
| Brawlhalla | 0.7–1.6 GB | 3 GB | Any DirectX 9 laptop iGPU |
| Albion Online | 1.8–2.6 GB | 4 GB, SSD advised | DirectX 10, 4 GB RAM |
| MARVEL SNAP | 4 GB stated | 6 GB | 4 GB RAM, iGPU fine |
| Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel | 335 MB, then ~11 GB | 16 GB required | 4 GB RAM, iGPU fine |
| Team Fortress 2 | 15 GB stated, ~22 GB in practice | 25 GB | GeForce 8 / Intel HD 3000 |
| VALORANT | ~23 GB (~26 GB installed) | 40 GB (Riot's own figure) | 4 GB RAM, entry GPU |
| Warframe | ~50 GB | 75 GB (official page) | Dedicated GPU expected |
| Path of Exile 2 | 83.7 GB preload | 100 GB | Dedicated GPU expected |
Read next
- Free games to play on PC: platforms, sizes and business models — Pillar of the silo — the wide view for a reader who has not picked a title yet.
- How free PC games make their money — Install size says nothing about monetisation; this answers the objection size cannot.
- Best free PC co-op games for two — Readers filtering by size often also filter by playing with one friend.