It recently came to my attention that the filesize of Sea of Thieves on consoles vastly differs from that of the PC version by like, 1-2 thirds depending on the platform we're comparing against.
Currently on Steam we're sitting at 133.27GB, apparently the PS5 version sits somewhere between 76GB (beta) and the Xbox Series X filesize of approximately 90-100GB, however the Series S filesize hovers around 40GB.
I've looked up some Series S gameplay at 1080p and- I'm not personally a resolution snob, it looked absolutely fine to me. While I'm sure increasing resolution above that threshold would start to appear muddy, that's all I need personally to, y'know, play the game. I'm just saying that this discrepancy nowadays seems more than a bit unreasonable and PC could likely be a large mitigating factor behind players' decision to keep the game installed, and maybe even a key cause in certain performance issues like stuttering, black screens or long load times (pure speculation on my part.)
So my suggestion is basically to lower the resolution of the textures in the base installation on Steam to that of the Xbox Series S with a high-definition texture "DLC" that can be opted out of in Steam settings. Now I know that the Windows Store is likely Rare's primary target for obvious reasons, but there are plenty of modern games like Call of Duty, Fortnite and Hoyoverse titles that have allowed partial uninstalls of certain chunks of game content to reduce filesize (I personally uninstall Fortnite's high resolution textures which currently saves me 35GB) and I imagine this could be implemented for that version alongside Steam and maybe even with PS5/Series X versions as well!
Now obviously I'm armchair devving here but a lower filesize and potentially better performance sounds like a huge win on several fronts and could absolutely increase player populations as more people could leave the game installed without having to sacrifice others for disk space (this would also make it easier for players' friends to tempt them back to the game now and then) while also possibly having other unseen benefits, especially with recent positive reception to Helldivers 2's filesize reduction. Games have several tools to provide this quality of life these days that I think it'd be worth the time investment. If the same could be extended to the Insiders build it may also result in an increase in participation in that version of the game, resulting in more testing and feedback.
Thanks for hearing me out.
