Microsoft Flight Simulator boss: we have 2,500,000GB of aerial data, streamed from the cloud

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the best-looking games ever made, but it doesn't chew through your storage space like other huge games that require 300GB+ of space.

The base install of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 weighs in at around 130GB, with a bunch of world updates bringing the full install to around 500GB. If you thought that was bad... well, be thankful we don't have petabyte-sized SSDs on the market yet.

In a recent interview with PCGamer, the Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorge Neumann, said: "We have two and half petabytes (2,500,000 GB) of aerial data, obviously we can't install that, so we stream that. The same is true for the digital elevation map. It's also huge, and we stream that as well. What we do now is, we stream a bunch of the measures, almost all of them, actually. So almost all of it is on the cloud side. And streaming works great, right? So there's no problems there. But the client side gets thinner and thinner".

"We are more and more confident that you can offload more and more things. When you look at our data set, it's exploding... we launched with 40 airports or something. Now we have 180, and those are all, like, 10GB. You're like, oh my God, how is this ever going to fit on anything? The fact is, it's the cloud, and it works...it feels like whatever comes to your mind you can actually do now, if you embrace the cloud".

• Read more: Microsoft Flight Simulator Benchmarked at 8K

"As a creator... back in the day, I worked on PlayStation One games and things like that, right? But I had to cut animation frames out of my characters, because there was no memory ever. Nowadays, I don't think we're bound by this anymore. I don't feel constrained any more".