I wanted to inform everyone of an upcoming change to our game install size resulting from work we have been doing behind the scenes to our install and patch process. To enable this change, there will be a larger than normal update size on February 6th, 2019. This change will both greatly reduce the game’s overall install size and optimise the way we update Sea of Thieves moving forward.

The update will see the following changes introduced:

Overall, the game install size will go down. For the different platforms, this will mean the following improvements: Xbox One – from an install size of 35GB to 10GB Xbox One X – from an install size of 47GB to 25GB Windows 10 PC – from an install size of 47GB to 27GB

Changes to how we generate game updates/patches will better enable us to manage future content being added to the game. This might mean that patch sizes increase slightly in the future, but the benefit is that the game install size won’t increase significantly. If we didn’t make this change, the game install size would continue to increase, taking up more and more of your hard drive space.

Due to the game install changing, we’ll be able to more quickly generate and transfer builds which is a significant part of day-to-day development internally at Rare. It’ll mean improvements to various areas of our development process, including how quickly we can generate builds and ship them to players.

The larger than usual update on February 6th is what will allow us to make all these improvements. When you’re prompted to install the update, it will download and fully reinstall the game at the install size listed above for your platform.

We wanted to let you know about this in advance so that you can plan accordingly, and we will remind people as we get closer to the date in our weekly Developer Update videos and on our social media channels.

Thank you for your understanding. This is an improvement to our process that will benefit everyone from this point onwards.

Thanks,

Joe