225 GB and 209.86 GB are the same download

A number arrived on 6 November with a byte count attached, which is rare enough in this campaign to be worth writing down: Microsoft’s catalogue lists the Xbox Series X|S package for Grand Theft Auto VI at 225,336,918,016 bytes. Outlets reading that entry printed two figures, the 209.86 GB shown on the Xbox Store and the 225.34 GB held in the backend, and the framing that travelled with them was that a 209.86 GB download expands to 225.34 GB once installed. It does not. Divide those bytes by a billion and the answer is 225.34. Divide the same bytes by 1,073,741,824 and the answer is 209.86. One file, counted in two notations. We could not load the catalogue entry ourselves and will say so plainly; what we can attest is that the byte count agrees with both published figures to the byte, which is what a real package size does and what a rounded guess does not.

That the pair reads as two sizes is a naming problem, not a compression one. Consoles report storage in binary units and print GB on the screen, so a single file is 209.86 in the drive menu and 225.34 in any decimal listing. This is the third time in a fortnight that one quantity has been published as two numbers, and the first two were read the same way. On 27 October a scrape of the PlayStation Store backend gave 210 GB; on 3 November Rockstar and Sony both printed 212 GB; this week Xbox gave 209.86 and 225.34. Each time the gap was treated as a second measurement rather than a second unit, and each time it became a story about a patch, a console advantage or a cut build.

The comparison built on top of it is where the unit stops being pedantry. RockstarINTEL and Notebookcheck both reported that the Xbox version is bigger than the PlayStation one, and the arithmetic behind that claim is 225.34 minus 210. The 210 is PlayStation Game Size’s 27 October scrape, and it has never been given in bytes or with a unit attached. Read it as binary and the Xbox package is 141 MiB smaller than the PlayStation one, which is to say the two builds are the same size within a rounding error. Read it as decimal and Xbox is 15.34 GB heavier. Nothing published decides between those readings, and the 15 GB gap — along with the day-one patch Notebookcheck proposed in order to explain it — exists in only one of them. The honest headline is not that Xbox is bigger. It is that one of the two numbers in the subtraction never had a unit, and the whole story sits inside that omission.

Rockstar’s own 212 is the same quantity a third time, and reading it in console units settles the pair of documents this site set against each other on 4 November. 212 GiB is 227.63 decimal GB. Sony’s page asks the buyer to clear “a minimum of 212GB of storage space”; Rockstar’s asks for “up to 212 GB of available space, depending on your device”; the Xbox package measures 209.86 GiB and the PlayStation one about 210. All of them land within roughly 2 GiB of each other in binary units, which is what a free-space target with headroom looks like. We read those two sentences as a ceiling in one document and a floor in the other, and inferred that at least one Xbox model must therefore need less than 212 GB. The sentence we produced was true by accident. No model is smaller — the unit was doing the work, and we should have asked which one before subtracting.

The regional builds are the only place where a difference survives the units. The same catalogue data puts the Japanese package at 208.74 GiB against 209.86 GiB for the global build, which is 1.12 GiB, or 1.20 decimal GB, lighter. The Australia and New Zealand build differs from the global one by 844 KiB, and that is metadata and nothing else — so the packages are not being partitioned by language, because the languages travel inside them and the regional builds are otherwise near-copies. That makes Japan the odd one out. Two outlets read the delta as censorship, citing CERO Z and the cuts made to Grand Theft Auto V; we are not going to, and the size is why. 1.20 GB is 0.53 per cent of the package — the footprint of a few minutes of 4K video, or a set of audio streams, and nowhere near the footprint of a mode. It supports one sentence, that something in the Japanese build is not in the others, and nothing about what that something is.

For anyone buying on 19 November the usable number is the boring one. A 512 GB Series S carries about 364 GB usable, and 209.86 GiB is 58 per cent of it, leaving roughly 154 GiB for everything else; on a 1 TB Series X at about 802 GB usable the game takes a quarter. What to clear before pre-load opens at 00:00 GMT on 10 November is 212 GiB of free space, which is what both platform documents say and what neither of them calls a game size. Three things stay unmeasured. Whether this package already contains the day-one patch or will be followed by one on top of it. Whether the PlayStation build has a byte count anywhere outside a photograph of a console’s storage screen. And whether Japan’s 1.20 GB is content taken out or content that was never put in. The first two decide how much space to free up. The third is the one people are arguing about, and it is the one a file size cannot answer.