Fortnite: New patch to reduce game size by over 60GB

In just the last decade game developers have gotten more and more comfortable asking for massive sections of your hard drive. Lately, Fortnite has decided to help make choosing which data to keep on your local PC easier by reducing its game by over 60GB through optimization.

Downtime for v14.40 has begun. We’ll let you all know when downtime has ended and services are back up.

— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) October 21, 2020

Why optimization matters for Fortnite, and what other games can learn

Before Fortnite, back when gaming was still in its infancy, most young gamers got introduced to video games through consoles. Consoles had limited space and a finite amount of processing power to work with, giving game designers clear boundaries to work within. If your game didn’t fit on the cartridge or disk, or the save data couldn’t be held on a single memory card, your game simply wasn’t playable.

But this all began to change with the PS3 and Xbox 360. These consoles blurred the lines between PC and console gaming with removable hard drives and game installations. At the same time, PC gaming became more accessible to a wider audience, and the differences have only continued to decrease.

Games like Fortnite seamlessly allow for gamers on PC, consoles, and phones to play with each other in real time, and while some modifications exist between versions the game is mostly the same.

And simultaneously, games have ballooned in size, as developers are no longer held back as much by processing speeds or storage space. But that growth can only continue for so long, and eventually developers will need to reduce their demanded hard drive space once again.

Please note the patch size will be larger than normal on PC (approx. 27 GB). This is to make optimizations on PC resulting in a massively reduced Fortnite file size (over 60 GB smaller), smaller downloads for future patches, and improved loading performance.

— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) October 20, 2020

Where Fortnite lies in the tipping point of data

Compared to some of the other games, Fortnite seems like it only asked for a small amount of space. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare currently clocks in at over 200GB, and had to allow players to uninstall the parts of the game they weren’t using just to remain playable for many players.

After this patch, Fortnite will only require 27GB of space, something almost all modern PCs can handle without too much discomfort.

Hopefully this Fortnite patch heralds a new era of data optimization, something that has been taken for granted given the modern world of mass storage devices.