Cloud Imperium Games has done it. Fans expecting a larger download for the Star Citizen client at 30-40 GB are going to need to upgrade their hard drives a bit more. The client will be at an astounding 100 GB, and this is before the patches.
CIG made this revelation when a fan asked the exact same question. This is what director of game operations Jeremy Masker said in turn:
As I have already said, I would not count on this. 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.
In plain English, unfortunately, this means the game is effectively unplayable for players in areas with low area connections, bandwidth caps, etc.
