Sea of Thieves will take up less space after next month’s update

It is no secret that Microsoft's exclusive games all have ridiculous file sizes. Gears 4 takes up over 120GB on console and PC, Halo 5 measures in at over 100GB, Quantum Break is in the same boat. Even Sea of Thieves is larger than it perhaps should be. Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft's developers have been looking into ways to reduce install sizes, with Sea of Thieves being the first to benefit with a size reduction of around 42 percent.

This week during a Sea of Thieves developer update, Rare announced that the team has been working on reducing the download and install size of the game. At launch, Sea of Thieves sat at 47GB, which is a larger file size than the launch version of The Witcher 3. Rare has managed to get Sea of Thieves down to 27GB instead, which is a decent turn around.

The downside is that this update will require players to reinstall the game, but you'll be saving 20GB of space, which seems like a fair trade- especially on Xbox where 500GB HDDs are the norm.

The update will be arriving on the 6th of February and aside from reducing the overall file size, it will also give Rare “much more control” over the patch process going forward.

KitGuru Says: Hopefully this is the start of a new directive across Microsoft's other studios, as the file sizes are far bigger than they really need to be. I'll keep my fingers crossed for Gears 5 staying below 100GB later this year. 

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