Microsoft is looking at reducing the required HDD space for Xbox One X 4K games through the use of the Cloud.

　　“Intelligent Delivery” is what Microsoft’s corporate Vice President and Director of Program Management for Xbox, Mike Ybarra, calls it in an interview with GamesRadar. File sizes have been increasing enormously through the use of higher quality 4K assets, and Microsoft appears to be actively looking for a solution to reduce the amount of space needed on your precious HDD.

　　"On the platform side [we're] looking at things like what we call internally 'Intelligent Delivery.'" It's basically a way of reducing the footprint a game will have on your storage space. As Ybarra explains things, it picks and choses what's stored on you HDD and keeps the rest elsewhere. The technology effectively says, "'Hey, here’s the bits you need for this section’ and keep[s] the rest on the Cloud."

　　Ybarra went on to say that people are comfortable with moving data that isn’t actively used, to the cloud to save up space.

　　It still sounds like Microsoft is expecting people to upgrade, with Ybarra mentioning that, "in general people usually always have more storage than they need," but, talking about the Intelligent Delivery idea, he observes that, "people are more comfortable saying ‘I’ve done playing that, let me push that back to the cloud so I’ve got more room there.’ So we’re looking at technology like that."

　　It surely sounds like an interesting approach, but only time will tell when and if this technology will be deployed by Microsoft.

　　The Xbox One X is scheduled for a global release on November 7th for $499 USD.