Somehow, over the past few years, Fortnite has managed to bloat itself into taking up over 90GB of hard drive space. Thankfully, today's update for the oversized battle royale took an axe to that figure, cutting the game's footprint by over two-thirds.
The version 14.40 update for Fortnite arrived earlier this morning, and at 27GB, it's a big one. As Epic explained, however, it sounds like the patch is performing some long-overdue tidying up, dramatically reducing Fortnite's install size with sweeping optimizations to the game's file structure.
Please note the patch size will be larger than normal on PC (approx. 27 GB). This is to make optimizations on PC resulting in a massively reduced Fortnite file size (over 60 GB smaller), smaller downloads for future patches, and improved loading performance.October 20, 2020
I'd recently uninstalled Fortnite to free up some disk space myself. On checking the launcher again the now, it does indeed look like the game now only requires a "mere" 26.3GB download, with a total install size of roughly 31.5GB. The update also plans to improve loading times and ensure that future updates should be a whole lot less taxing.
Fortnite wasn't always so massive, mind. Back in 2018, Epic's fresh-faced battle royale only took up a paltry 18GB of drive space. But it seems years of drastic map updates and countless new outfits, gliders and assorted cosmetics had ballooned the game's footprint to a frankly daft size, considering the game's single murder island.
Regardless, it's welcome news both for those of us with limited disk space and capped download speeds. Reckon it's time Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare took the hint?
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