According to research undertaken by the Eurogamer game-enthusiast website, the newest system update will reduce—by dramatic amounts, in some cases—the amount of hard-drive space taken up by games installed onto the system. Among the reductions Eurogamer discovered is a nearly one-fifth shaving by King of Fighters XII from 3.4GB to a little over 700MB; Raiden Fighters Aces dropping from 3.4GB to 484MB; and a decline for Left4Dead from 5GB to 3.7GB.
The article's author indicates that he believes the savings is due to a trimming in what data needs to be stored on the HD, with the thought that the bloated installs done under the previous/current operating system might include unnecessary duplication of the install DVD's copy-protection data. By removing this special security formatting, users reap the benefit of a drastically smaller install, which in turn can result in faster loading times for each play session. It's expected that this data dieting will enable users to not only get more games on the HD, but also benefit the larger Games on Demand catalog that Microsoft is expecting to launch this month.
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