It doesn’t actually need 130gb of updates, that’s the fun part. They probably only made a couple gigabytes of changes at most, just their shitty folder/packing structure requires downloading every single ‘unit’ of the game again because they made minor changes
What the hell? Surely someone at their professional game development studio is capable of writing a patcher? It’s not black magic.
But hosting and letting everyone download the whole file is cheaper for them.
Surely the bandwidth costs alone should be more expensive, no?
I assume the console / game store pays for the bandwidth, not them. No skin off their back
Depends.
On the hand hosting and bandwidth cost have come down significantly to the point where the price per gigabyte is in the 0.0 cent region. On the other hand, developers are incredibly expensive, especially when they could do something that results in even more value for the company.
At the end of the day, downloading the full file is a reliable and all in all cheap way of providing an update, even if it’s annoying and frustrating as hell to download 138GB just because one bit was flipped.
Well, I know this one girl who’s really good at repacking shit… maybe she could teach some of their devs!
I’m sure she could teach them to FIT the updates into a much smaller file.
Ark Survival Evolved over in the corner hoping nobody notices its 700GB+ if you download every map.
Ark is total madness. Every map has a copy of every dinosaur. Not just the dinos for that map, but all dinos in the game. That’s because you can transfer dinos, so somebody may transfer a dino to your map from a mao that you don’t have the DLC for. And you still need to be able to see and interact with that dino.
I wonder if the new Ark Ascended fixed that.
I’m no game dev, but did they not consider saving the dinos once and loading them in to each map as required?
They probably tried and failed. IIRC the original Ark was build on a pre-release version of Unreal engine 4. There were probably loads of things missing or broken in that engine. When they couldn’t make UE load assets from a shared storage location, it was probably just easier to ship all dinos with every map.
I struggle to grasp how games can even fill up all of that disk space. Do they store all their textures uncompressed?
Uncompressed textures and uncompressed audio for all languages at once (this started with the 8th gen consoles because their shitty CPUs couldn’t handle real-time decompression), so a lot of space is being taken up by audio that’s never used in languages you don’t understand because at some point in the last 20 years the gaming industry forgot how to create checkbox installers.
Tripple A devs making their games not take up your entire hard drive challenge (100% impossible)
At this point COD should sell a custom physical SSD Drive with their game installed, like game DVD in consoles
Full circle back to cartridges
The real conspiracy is that a big game requires you to delete or limit the number of competitors games. Not only is yhere no incentive to be smaller, there is actually a strategic incentive to be bigger.
Kind of odd that anon wants to play a 130 GB fishing game, must have some really detailed fish…
They are fully anatomically correct fish with every single cell rendered individually for maximum realism.
