Star Citizen will destroy your puny South African broadband connection

Business

March 13, 2015

Fancy a spot of high-quality space adventuring in Star Citizen? Well, I hope patience is one of your virtues, because it could take days to download.

According to the developers of the stupidly-successful crowd-funded space sim, the final game will be delivered at around 100GB.

As the game is download-only, it’s a gut-punch for anyone who has a less-than-stellar Internet connection. Like, say, basically everyone in South Africa.

To put this into perspective, data from the Ookla Household Value Index shows that South Africa sits on the lower side of things when it comes to average download speeds.

At the country’s average download speed of 6.8Mbps (which is optimistic, at best), you’re looking at around 33 hours of downloading for a 100GB file.

Granted, if you have a Telkom LTE connection which topped a recent survey at around 70.8Mbps – that can be reduced to just over 3 hours.

However, you would still have to pay the data costs, which would amount to about R1,800 for the 60GB+60GB bundle data bundle – so that might not be the best way to go.

In terms of download speeds, though, the opposite is also true: if you hit 2Mbps, you’ll be waiting 110 hours, or close to 5 days, to get your hands on the title.

Add the fact that 100GB is enough to smash through the biggest ADSL data caps, and some lower-end uncapped fair-use limits, and Star Citizen quickly becomes one of the most laborious games to get your hands on in SA.

But the craziness doesn’t end there, of course. Developer Cloud Imperium also noted that the game’s patches are also going to be quite large.

With each patch containing hundreds of assets, at around 200MB each, patches could be between 2-6GB in size.

If there’s a patch that requires 30-40% of the assets to be re-downloaded, patches could hit as much as 20GB.