Star Citizen likely to have a 100GB client

The in development crowd funded space sim Star Citizen is likely to require a 100GB download for the client software.

Roberts Space Industries director of game operations Jeremy Masker revealed the unusually high size on the official forums, rebutting a previous estimate of around 30-40GB. The large client size is simply because of the size and number of assets that need to be delivered.

As well as a 100GB client, it is likely that subsequent patches will also run between 2-6GB as opposed to the hundreds of megabytes previously expected. Masker states that this is for the exact same reason as each patch will include hundreds of assets, each of which would be around 200MB each.

Patches could even stretch to 14-20GB if files from the original client need to be re-downloaded. Developers are however looking at patch compression to keep this to a minimum.

Star Citizen, led by Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts, holds the current record for the most funds raised in a crowd-funding campaign. Unlike most other crowd-funded projects, Roberts Space Industries left the doors open for backers to continue throwing money at the project and has currently raised just under $75m.

Whilst at present, parts of Star Citizen are available to backers, a full release date is not anticipated until 2016.