Steam Pre-load has just started.

[Nomadski]

Hmm. 4.4 gigs is a curiously low amount - I guess we won't be getting highres textures, then?

(For comparison, the X3TC folder, with albion prelude, is touch under 9gigs, i.e. double the Rebirth's).

Files will be compacted for ease of download, extracted when installed fully. Im sure you will see a significant size increase.

[inreality]

Preloaded. Makes me even more impatient. Hard week to come.

[X2-Eliah]

Files will be compacted for ease of download, extracted when installed fully. Im sure you will see a significant size increase.

We're still talking about gamefiles, though (many of which have their own inherent compressions - e.g. image formats, 3d models - and don't really compress any further efficiently). I don't think I've ever seen a modern game with compressed size of less than 80% of normal - being generous and allowing a 3/4 compression, we're still at, what, 5.something gigs? That's still a small size for a modern game.

Also, doesn't steam unpack the data instantly? The installation size on disk should be the final game size once it's been downloaded - so if that's 4.4gigs, then that's 4.4 gigs.

[BlueSabor]

I’m backing up the pre-load in case steam tries to re-download the pre-load

Locate the folder called depotcache in your steam directory.

Copy it to somewhere else on your computer.

[Geek]

Illegal copy attempt detected.
Deleting account...

[BlueSabor]

Ha

[EmperorJon]

Oh no!

[danpaul88]

Regarding the download *only* being 4.4GB... you can fit a lot of content into 4.4GB. The reason other games are so huge is generally because their developers simply don't care about how much disk space they eat up because everyone surely has massive hard drive these days, right? To me, the 4.4GB download size just tells me Egosoft have actually gone to the effort of compressing their game data to a sensible size, which is a good thing.

CoD: Ghosts is a good example... a friend of mine told me the PS4 version requires 49GB of disk space... thats 1/10th of the entire hard drive in the 500GB model. That's just plain ridiculous and epic laziness on the part of the developer... then again, when you're just re-releasing the same game every year with tweaked models I guess that's just par for the course.

[jasonbarron]

Only 4.4 gigs...I guess XR is a grower, not a shower.

[Ursadorable]

What the...where do you live and how do you have this kind of speed?

I'm in Alberta, and Shaw Cable has 250Mbps connections.

{Commercial link removed. - Terre}

Granted, I only took the 100Mbps connection service, but regularly get around 9MB/sec (yes, byte not bit) when downloading games from Steam.

[Dave500]

Another preload of 293 MB today (4.64 GB total)

Somehow I feel there's more to come !