Sea of Thieves’ files sizes are about to get a lot smaller

Rare has announced that they plan to change the way that Sea of Thieves’ install and patching processes are handled, promising to significantly reduce the size of the game on both PC and Xbox One platforms, with plans to keep the game’s install size small moving forward. 

This change will come with the game’s February 6th patch, which will be a lot larger than usual to cover the storage shift. However, after the update is finished, the game’s install size will be at least 20GB smaller on all platforms. On PC the game’s install size will reduce from 47GB to 27GB, while Xbox One will reduce from 35GB to 10GB and Xbox One X’s install size will reduce from 47GB to 25GB.  

Moving forward, Sea of Thieves’ updates and patches will be slightly larger in size, with each change allowing the game’s overall install size to remain small. These changes will be vital for console users, as HDD storage space is limited on the Xbox platform and external HDDs have some notable downsides. 

This change will also allow Rare to generate new builds of Sea of Thieves at a faster rate, which the game to be more efficiently developed, allowing new builds to be delivered to players faster.