No Man's Sky is only 6GB on disc

Unlike most games today, the infinite universe of No Man's Sky won't break your HDD space. In fact the entire game will fit on a 16GB thumb drive.

Even with its monstrously huge procedurally generated galaxies, No Man's Sky will only be 6GB in its disc form. Sean Murray even says that most of the 6GB is audio. Yes, really. The game has some 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets and its total install size is still less than the day-one patches of AAA games. With a size like this Hello Games doesn't even have to use a Blu-ray disc; they could just use a dual-sided DVD.

No Man's Sky owes its small install size to its procedurally generated environments, which offers advantages like "smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay." Both the New Yorker and PBS (see video above) have excellent content explaining how Hello Games made No Man's Sky's universe, so be sure to check those out.

It's great to see games offer staggering content while keeping an extremely managable file size. Normally we see 50GB games--and in Halo 5's case, 80GB+--and I'm one of the many gamers whose been forced to buy bigger HDDs to fit my games.

In other news, Hello Games has officially finished No Man's Sky and is already submitting multiple versions of the game to appropriate markets. The game will be upon us in less than one month, so be sure to check out our huge list of everything you can do in No Man's Sky for a refresher.

No Man's Sky launches on August 9 on PS4 and PC.