Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the best looking games ever made, but it doesn’t take up as much storage as other huge games that require over 300GB of storage.
The base install of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 weighs in at around 130GB, with a bunch of world updates the total install is around 500GB. If you thought that was bad… well, be glad there aren’t any petabyte-sized SSDs on the market yet.
In a recent interview with PCGamer, Microsoft Flight Simulator director Jorge Neumann said: “We have two and a half petabytes (2,500,000 GB) of aerial data, of course we can’t install that, so we stream it. The same goes for the digital elevation map. It’s also huge, and we stream it too. What we’re doing now is we’re streaming a bunch of the measurements, actually almost all of them. So almost all of it is on the cloud side. And the streaming works great, right? So there are no problems there. But the client side is getting thinner and thinner“.
“We’re becoming more and more confident that you can outsource more and more things. If you look at our dataset, it’s exploding… we started with 40 airports or something. Now we have 180, and they’re all about 10GB. You think, “Oh my God, how is this ever going to fit anywhere?” The fact is, it’s the cloud, and it works… it feels like you can actually do anything you can think of now when you use the cloud.“.
“As a creator… back then I was working on PlayStation One games and things like that, right? But I had to cut animation frames out of my characters because there were never memories. I don’t think we’re bound by that today. I don’t feel limited anymore“.
