One of the most eagerly awaited games in the Xbox Series X to be released next year is going to occupy an enormous amount of space.

The Xbox Store listing for "Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl," due out on April 28, has been updated to reveal a file size of 180 GB. [According to our sister site GamesRadar's Xbox Series X install size list, the game is a storage hog, beating out Marvel's "Avengers Endgame Edition" and "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War" at 139GB. surpassing them to take the top spot by a landslide.

The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are listed as having capacities of 1 TB and 512 GB, respectively, but when non-movable system files are taken into account, they are actually much smaller, with the Series X having 802 GB and the Series S having only 364 GB. Put another way, if the list is accurate, Stalker 2 would account for 22% of the Series X's usable storage and 49% of the Series S's.

Of course, there are ways to expand storage capacity on either console: inexpensive ways using external SSDs or HDDs, and expensive ways using official Xbox Series X/S expansion cards. The external drive is the only way to do this, because it only allows you to play backward-compatible games, not games designed for the Xbox Series consoles.

This leaves Xbox owners with a tricky choice: play through the games they are playing, delete titles to make room on an ad hoc basis, or pay big bucks for convenience. Expansion cards come in three sizes: $140 for 512GB, $220 for 1TB, and $400 for 2TB, which is no small undertaking considering that the Xbox Series X costs $499 on its own.

Whichever approach you prefer, "Stalker 2" has certainly been a long time coming. It has been 12 years since the third entry in the Stalker series, Call of Pripyat, was released on PC, and the series still has a large following today; given that it will be released on Xbox Game Pass on day one, when the long-awaited date finally arrives on April 28, its fan base should be even larger.