With the Xbox One X available now, a lot of developers have been releasing patches for their Xbox One games to optimize them for 4K resolution and HDR output. Predictably enough, though, some of these patch files have been absolutely massive in size- take Quantum Break, for instance. In an interview with Game Informer, Xbox marketing head Albert Penello said that this issue is being looked into at Microsoft.
When asked about the massive file sizes, and how Xbox One X owners should deal with these (especially considering that the Xbox One X only comes with 1 TB internal memory, unlike the Xbox One S, which had 2 TB SKUs as well), Penello said that in addition to several steps that Microsoft have already taken, they’re looking further into the issue as well.
“We’re generally seeing that the 4K patches are bigger, but they’re obviously not double or four times bigger,” Penello said. “They’re on average probably a third larger than the 1080p assets. We’re doing a lot of what we call intelligent delivery to help that on both consoles. We have enabled a new set of tools for developers to allow them to segment the assets by console, and also things that take up a lot of space like language packs and stuff like that, which typically go down as one big download. We’re making a lot of effort with developers to make downloads better.”
“I also have to remind myself and people in the industry that we have abnormally large content libraries relative to the average customer because of what we do,” he continued. “We definitely run into edge-cases that the typically customer won’t run into.”
Penello did, however, encourage Xbox One X owners to buy an external hard drive nonetheless. “The last thing is that I do encourage the external hard drive as something we’ve supported from the get-go,” he said. “We’ve found that even when we had internal hard drive swap ability like on Xbox 360, that people don’t really like to crack open their consoles. Having external hard drive support – and those are very affordable these days; there was just this 4 TB on sale for, like, $110 I think – is a great way to get a ton of storage.”
“I think we have a lot of options for people,” he added. “Obviously, we’re trying to solve it with the developers, we’re trying to solve it for users, and we’re trying to make it easy for people who do have huge libraries to expand their storage without have to get a new system or crack it open or anything like that.”
The Xbox One X launched today worldwide. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for continued coverage.
