Rockstar Games has confirmed Grand Theft Auto VI’s (GTA VI) storage requirements on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 consoles. Users will need 212GB of free SSD storage, and will have up to nine days to pre-load the game, ahead of the scheduled November 19 launch.
The developer has confirmed that GTA VI pre-loading will debut earlier than previously announced, starting on November 10 for those owning a digital copy, and on the 12th for those opting for the physical version. In case you’re confused by the latter, the physical version of GTA VI will not include game files; it’s just a box with a voucher to activate the game on your console.
Beyond being a letdown for those who like to own their games on disc, by opting for this version, you get just about six days to download the 212GB stack of files, compared to nine days offered to those owning a digital copy.
Needless to say, 212GB is a huge amount to dedicate to a single game, and that’s before any day-one patches or content updates have been issued. To put this in perspective, 212GB represents about a quarter of the Xbox Series X’s and PlayStation 5’s available storage.
These machines might ship with 1TB SSDs, but their operating system takes a good chunk of it, leaving the PlayStation 5, for example, with just about 825GB of usable space. The situation is worse for those owning an Xbox Series S, who will see half of their storage capacity taken.
That said, this is still less than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, which, when fully installed with single-player campaign, multiplayer, Zombies, and Warzone, gobbles up 235GB. If it lives up to its hype and dethrones Vice City as my favourite GTA game of all time, then dedicating 212GB wouldn’t be an issue for me at least.
Of course, freeing up space is only one part of the storey – you’ll need to download that 212GB of data as well, which is going to take a while for those still chugging along with slow connections. While this shouldn’t take more than an hour for those rocking a Gigabit connection, and about five hours for those on 100Mb/s fibre, those still on DSL copper connections may need two days or more to finish.
With this size, it’s understandable that GTA VI didn’t ship on disc. Even the largest Blu-ray disc can only store 100GB of data. That said, this is unlikely the only reason behind this choice. By going fully digital, Rockstar avoids leaks ahead of launch.
Size aside, digital pre-loading on PlayStation 5 will begin on Tuesday, November 10 at midnight local time in your respective time zone. On Xbox Series X/S, pre-loading will begin globally on Tuesday, November 10 at 12:00am GMT. Code-in-box (physical) versions for both consoles should be available from retailers on November 12.
