That's some impressive optimization there.

Microsoft flight Simulator is a gigantic game. After all, it's a flight simulator that lets you fly literally anywhere on planet Earth. The minimum storage requirement for the game is a whopping 150GB but the installed size is often much higher than that, upwards of 170+GB in size. This probably annoys a lot of people regardless of whether of not they have monthly download caps from their ISP.

Fortunately, the latest update to the game reduces the initial download by about half. You're looking at a reduction of 170GB down to just 83GB in size. Microsoft remained coy about what they did to reduce this download size, stating only that they "performed some optimization for the initial full download of the title."

Of course, the download process is still a little bit annoying, especially if you're going through Steam. The initial download is still just 700MB in size. This is for the game's launcher. Once that's installed, the launcher will download about another 82GB of data. It's still a lot of downloading, but far less than what it used to be.

Also included in this latest update is a change in how weather data is downloaded. The amount of bandwidth used to download weather data has been reduced, which could lead to increased performance for users. There are plenty of additional changes included in this update. Be sure to check them all out if you are interested in the game in any capacity.