From PCGamer.

There was never any question that Star Citizen was going to be a massive game, both in scope and in file size. But Jeremy Masker, the director of game operations at Cloud Imperium Games, has warned that it may be a whole lot more massive than people expect—especially folks who are stuck with data caps.

The unhappy word came in response to a Roberts Space Industries forum user who posted a message predicting that the final release of the game will be "significantly more compressed and optimized" than it currently is, resulting in an initial client size of 30-40GB. Patches will also be optimized, he added, and would thus run in the hundreds of megabytes each.

Not so, said Masker. "As I have already said, I would not count on this," he wrote. "The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains that we will be able to reduce our client size to 30-40GB. The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100GB."

"Also, yes we are optimizing game patching for speed and to only deliver diffs, but this is unlikely to reduce actual patch size," he continued. "Again, each patch has 100s of assets, each of these assets are at times 200mb, this leads to 2-6gb patches, and if we end up doing a file type re-factor and have to re-download 30-40% of the assets on the hard-drive, then the patch will be 14-20gb."

That may not seem like much to those of you with super-fast connections and unlimited data, but it's a serious hindrance to anyone lacking either. There may not be much choice in the matter—big game, big files—but it may prove prohibitive for an awful lot of people who were looking forward to playing.

But that would require me to delete 100gb of porn :(

F dat

Also RIP datacaps

How many years are you expected to play before you finish the game?

Even Skyrim is only like 6-10 GB. Granted I'm sure much is textures, maps and objects, but still, wow, huge game.

I'm glad this isn't an issue for me being on unlimited, my main tradeoff on my island seems to be the sacrifice of upload speed, out of the 3-4 ISP's here they all suck at delivering high upload speeds which results in me never bothering with uploading massive photo archives and videos, I'd have started a LP channel if I could.

Sucks about those with data caps though but really data caps should be elimated because they do more harm than good when things outside the cap progress and require more data/bandwidth.

On the bright side at least the game will look amazeballs when it finally does release.

Also than the maker for cheap HDD's.

Yawn, Infinite Space on DS is 128MB, looks perfectly fine and has loads of content.

SC is shaping up to be a rather large game, but file size tends to speak more of the quality of assets, as well as the amount and compression of audio and pre-renderd cutscenes. That's why we often see very linear (and fairly short) titles like Ryse and 1886 taking up more space than open world titles like inFamous:SS and Sunset Overdrive.

Considering how strong a focus SC has on delivering a 'true' PC gaming experience (meaning incredibly high quality assets), 100GB isn't that surprising. Still pretty damn huge though :p

True, Ryse is 37GB on my Xbox, and 1886 is like 30GB?  so it's around 3 times.  Not really that surprizing.

Vectors and reusing textures can go a long way to keeping a big game smaller.  Still it's that extra diget that makes it sound so big.

So 5 more years till games are half a terabyte?

(I remember when 640k was more than we thought we could ever use. )

Yeah, 1886 is about 30GB (quite large considering its length and lack of pre-rendered cutscenes).

As amusing as that would be, I don't think we'll see many games need that much room for quite a long time. Not if the pinnacle of PC graphics (which hasn't even properly released yet) is 'only' hitting 100GB. Internet speeds will also need to improve a lot if digital sales continue to rise. Will be interesting to see how things unfold though ^^

So, Final Fantasy XV will be 150 GB?

Yes, but considering 5G networks can top of a 1T a second - and that's the next cellular.  I think we will be fine (Unless certain companies can politicians can keep internet speeds down.)