What's the size of the largest patch on Wii U so far?

Solution 1:

As a response to the titled question, the largest single firmware update on Wii U was the 4.0.0 update which was 701MB.

Regarding the actual file size of Virtual Console games, currently the largest SNES game on the market appears to be Earthbound at a download size of 43MB. Assuming that all the titles you download are at 40MB, you'd be around 400MB of storage for all your titles.

  • The 8GB Basic Set has approximately 3GB available for data storage and download.
  • A certain amount (~5GB) of space is used by the operating system, pre-installed software, save data, account-related data and other kinds of data.
  • Nintendo Land cannot be downloaded onto the 8 GB Basic Set system but you can purchase the game at retail and there is room for save data.
  • If you don't have enough storage space, a message will be displayed on screen with the relevant information. You can also go to Data Management in the System Settings to see details about your available storage space.

Sources:

List of Virtual Console Games

Solution 2:

  • The first update was around 5GB, according to multiple tweets and sites. See here for an article, and links to those tweets.

  • The 4.0.0 update was indeed around 600/700 MB, as said above.

  • 2.1 was around 600 MB source

  • 3.0.0 downloading could take up to an hour, according to Nintendo, according to this site. Assuming Nintendo assumes not everyone has a > 1 MB/s speed, it is well under the 5GB of the day-one patch.

  • 4.0.2 was "rather small", according to this site.

  • Update 5.0.0 was also small, very small compared to other in my opinion: it was ~530 MB according to this Reddit post. I bought my secondhand WiiU while it was downloading this update, it was done in under 15 minutes. I don't know the download speed where I bought it, but that's rather fast.

I didn't search for more file sizes, but I think we can take a conclusion here. I found the x.0.0 updates, which should be the largest. The first update, the day-one patch, was by far the largest - 5 GB. After that, each update was between 500-700 MB, with the largest one the 4.0.0 update (from the updates I found and listed above), which is 701 MB. I think that in the future they will most likely be around this size again.