'We have 2,500,000 GB of aerial data, so we stream that'—why the cloud is the future of Microsoft Flight Simulator and likely many more games to come

Game install sizes are the worst. Ok, a bit dramatic, but I can't be the only one that groans when I look at a game's system requirements and spot a huge number of GBs I'll have to make room for on my SSD. In recent years, that allocation of precious storage space has become larger and larger. To be honest, it stresses me out.

Take God of War Ragnarök, for example: 190 GB. 190 precious gigabytes for a single game, and it's not even one of the worst offenders. Ark Survival Evolved made headlines with a ludicrous 330 GB install requirement, and with all DLC's attached some players reported that total topping 400 GB. 

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 isn't exactly light on the install size either, with the base game coming in at 130 GB, and various world updates bringing the total to around 500 GB. And the Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorge Neumann, says it could well have been a lot worse than that:

"We have two and half petabytes (2,500,000 GB) of aerial data, obviously we can't install that, so we stream that. The same is true for the digital elevation map. It's also huge, and we stream that as well. What we do now is, we stream a bunch of the measures, almost all of them, actually.

"So almost all of it is on the cloud side. And streaming works great, right? So there's no problems there. But the client side gets thinner and thinner."

According to Neumann, MSFS 2024 is aiming for around a 50 GB install size, thanks to offloading even more data requirements to the cloud. And, by pushing large assets off to the streaming side of things, it's not just your SSD space that'll benefit. The real prize here is what developers might be capable of when not all of the data is installed on your local machine:

"We are more and more confident that you can offload more and more things. When you look at our data set, it's exploding… we launched with 40 airports or something. Now we have 180, and those are all, like, 10 GB. 

"You're like, oh my God, how is this ever going to fit on anything? The fact is, it's the cloud, and it works…it feels like whatever comes to your mind you can actually do now, if you embrace the cloud."

When you put it like that, having an entire game's worth of local assets on your machine strikes as something that may well become old-fashioned. Certainly, it makes a change from the old days of game development, where every MB mattered and internet connections were too unreliable to deliver vast amounts of content on demand.

"As a creator… back in the day, I worked on PlayStation One games and things like that, right? But I had to cut animation frames out of my characters, because there was no memory ever. Nowadays, I don't think we're bound by this anymore. I don't feel constrained any more."

So, while the interconnectivity of the cloud certainly has its downsides (I'm looking at you, biggest tech outage of all time), are we looking at a future where all our next-generation gaming is done through a compact thin client, reaching out to the big wide world for the majority of its assets?

Of course, services like Nvidia's Geforce Now, in which entire games are played on data center PCs and streamed to a thin client capable of running on low powered devices, already exist. But what Neumann is talking about here seems like a different thing entirely. Your PC is still handling the heavy lifting of rendering the game, it's just the data it's pulling from is coming in from the cloud, keeping your install sizes low and allowing developers the freedom to go bananas with the assets.

There are downsides, of course. As gamers, we're already—I think it's fair to say—wary of games that require a constant internet connection to function, especially for single player experiences. 

But—and I don't want to sound too overprivileged here (but I probably will)—as an owner of a fast internet connection, I can't help but be tantalised by the possibility of what games might look like if all the major assets were piped in, in a way that's simply impractical to download in one chunk to my machine.

And if it frees up some more delicious space on my PC, all the better. After all, big SSDs aren't as cheap as they used to be, y'know. Price of fish, and all that.