Twitter Doubts the PC Install Size of Skyrim. Bethesda says “No Way”

Giuseppe Nelva October 26, 2011 6:30 PM EST

By now we know that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will eat up a relatively small 6 Gigabytes on your hard disk, if you plan to play it on PC (as you probably should). Many users on twitter wondered if that wasn’t a bit too small, considering that most other games nowadays have a much bigger install size.

Pete Hines, Vice President of PR and Marketing at Bethesda, has been bombarded by messages about the perceived issue for a whole day and didn’t appear too pleased on his twitter account. In the end he decided to give a clear cut explanation for the slim install size:

Because content doesn’t take lots more space if you know how to build an open world game, which we do. Oblivion was, what, 4 (Gb) something? Did it have more content than these games being mentioned that have 2x or 3x the install? 6 gigs: New engine and we’re much better at compression (art/voice/data). It’s huge yet more optimized than we’ve had before. And faster.

There you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. Skyrim doesn’t have a relatively small install size because it’s light on content or has less assets than other games, but just because those assets are better compressed and optimized than those of the usual 12 Giga-heavy AAA game.

Whatever your take on the issue is, you probably needn’t worry, as considering the metric ton of mods that will appear shortly after release and in the following years, your Skyrim install size will end up taking half of your hard disk. My Oblivion folder is currently hovering around 50 Gigabytes. What is yours?