GTA 6’s Massive Download Could Take Several Days To Install

Grand Theft Auto 6 is on the horizon, but players intent on downloading the game may be in for a long wait. The good news is that per an official Take-Two statement to Variety, the physical release of the game will not be delayed, to try to prevent spoilers. The bad news is that if you don't have the physical media, or have a console without an optical drive, you could be downloading the game for several days.

As UK broadband provider USwitch points out, slower or sub-broadband connections (50 mbps, 30 mbps, and 10 mbps, and lower) could all take a day or more to download and install the game, with a 10 Mbps download estimated to take six days and six hours. While USwitch made a key mistake and built its estimates around a falsified 676.7 GB download size, there is still a valid point to be made here—at a more realistic estimate of 200-300 GB, a 10 mbps Internet connection would still take two days to download the entirety of Grand Theft Auto 6.

But, what is our file size estimate based on? Existing AAA releases often weigh-in at around 120-150 GB. Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, demands 150 GB of drive space on a PC. God of War: Ragnarok needs a hearty 190 GB, and for some ungodly reason, Call of Duty's file size can balloon up to 240 GB with all components installed. Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced Edition, conversely reduces download size to about ~92 GB versus the base game's ~115 GB, despite having higher-quality assets and supporting RT.

This difference seems to boil down to improved file compression and optimization, including deduplication of files for Enhanced. So while Grand Theft Auto 6 will likely require a massive download and consume considerable disk space, we'd wager it being closer to 200 GB than the proposed 676 GB of USwitch's claim. With GTA Online and potential DLCs being a factor, we also don't see Rockstar shipping a game that would potentially suck up the entirety of a base PS5's storage space, which is about 650 GB once system files are taken into consideration.