med-img

Xbox Live Arcade Games No Longer Facing File Size Cap

Posted September 24, 2009 by James Brightman

One of the primary differences between games on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network has been that Sony's PSN service never instituted any file size restrictions, while Microsoft initially limited XBLA titles to 50MB and later to 150MB. Now, however, it would appear those file size caps are gone. 

According to IGN, Microsoft's Scott Austin, director of digital games, said that 2GB is now the new "limit," not because Microsoft decided to make that the new cap, but because 2GB is actually the technical limitation of the system structure of XBLA. Obviously, Games on Demand, which allows for complete downloads of full Xbox 360 retail titles (which can be severals gigabytes in size), uses a different file structure. 

Although this would appear to be the first public confirmation of the removal of a file size cap, Microsoft apparently made the decision to ditch the restrictions a while ago since Shadow Complex clocked in at almost 1GB in size while the recently released C&C 3 Commander's Challenge pack was around 2GB.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.