Why PC Game Downloads are so Big

The problem is you are assuming that the average PC gamer is as smart as you and will tolerate being told to "wait" as something downloads even though it is minimizing your HDD space. From a customer service point of view is better to tolerate bitching about big downloads or a litany of complaints caused by unintended consequences of modular downloads? One big download is a very KISS approach and probably why it sticks around.

Then as a test, limit the modular downloads to language packs at first. Set the default language download to whatever language the downlading program is displaying in and then have a popup asking to check the box for additional languages. Saves time for the user in terms of reduced downloading, saves bandwidth, saves load on the server, and no wide array of options to screw up.
 
Then as a test, limit the modular downloads to language packs at first. Set the default language download to whatever language the downlading program is displaying in and then have a popup asking to check the box for additional languages. Saves time for the user in terms of reduced downloading, saves bandwidth, saves load on the server, and no wide array of options to screw up.

Or just hide the options behind an "Advanced Options" button that basic users don't touch.

I can't imagine that this adds a ton of programmer time or complexity to the process, especially if a company like Valve comes up with a standard process for it. On the flipside it could probably save LOTS in bandwidth.

Distribution costs with digital distribution are lower than they have ever been, but they are certainly not free.
 
High speed internet is becoming the norm and I prefer game developers put pressure on ISPs by increasing the average rate of data consumption among consumers.
It's not as norm as you may think. Where I live in ny you either have time warner cable or nothing, and many MANY people can't even get time warner because we live in the country. My only net connection is my phone, and I have to pay a ton for 60 gigs of data a month. I would love to have an alternative, but there are none. And there won't be because if I want twc on my road I have to pay them over 10 grand to just for the honor of paying them per month for cable. It's a lose lose situation.
 
No amount of development effort can change a 40GB game into an "easy to download" 1GB game, so project managers aren't going to spend their limited development resources on this. And no one is going to not download a game that's 40GB instead of 30GB, which might be a realistic size improvement achievement.

Reducing download size is something everyone thinks they care about, but in reality, they don't care about. It doesn't affect their decision to buy the game or not in terms of what is realistically achievable for a given game.
I suspect you are, but you may not be old enough to remember a day when there were NO downloads for installing games, because they *gasp* came on CDs or DVDs! lol So in reality it's their lack of effort that is causing it. They just don't want to offer a disc version.

Joking aside...

Personally I don't think it's that much of an ask for the publishers to provide a disc option for us. I don't give a shit if they want to make it available on Steam/UPlay/Origin by default, but there's absolutely no reason that they can't provide us a choice.

Honestly, I'd gladly even pay Steam to do this! Think about it...
  • You are given the option: BD (25GB) or DVD-DL (8.4GB). (25GB on BD to ensure drive compatibility)
  • Maybe $5-6/disc for BD and $2.50-3/disc on DVD.
  • You select which games you want from your Library (to make their life easier), it will keep a tally of how big THEIR archive is and how many discs it will require. The more games selected, the potential for fewer discs needed since not all will take up a full DVD-DL. However, the option for "One Game Per Disc" would be available, at the user's expense of course.
  • Discs will just be high quality DVD-R DLs with white covers that have the contents printed on. If a game spans multiple discs it'd just say "#/#". Example: Disc 1 - "Fallout 3 (Game, DLC1 name, DLC2 name, etc), Fallout 4 (Game and DLC list) 1/2" Disc 2 "Fallout 4 2/2, Universe Sandbox"
  • Shipping is... what would be fair? I'm conflicted here. Mainly on how to hold discs. Plastic cases, spindle, paper envelopes with the window? The last one would mean like up to 5 could easily be put in a Media Envelope and shipped for $1-2 or even free. Cases and Spindles would significantly increase that though. Lets just say "Free to $10",depending on number of discs being sent.
I'd be onboard with that, since AT&T are fuckholes who refuse to service my street, and I'm forced to use cellular (I regret moving to TN *sigh*). It's absurd... So it's quite hard for me to get games I buy. I either have to wait each year when we fly to the cabin and stay at a hotel, to hog their bandwidth as much as I can, and then continue doin that at airport/s... OR I send a 500GB 2.5" HDD to a buddy of mine in Canada who I trust with my Steam credentials, who downloads new stuff for me and/or updates games if they've had big ones. Like this FO4 texture pack at 56GB... I might not have the computer to play it (yet, c'mon Ryzen+Vega!) but I still want the damn thing! It's a pain that it's so big too, since it'll require a device to store on. I'm really hoping it's going to be it's own FO4 Data file like DLC, and easily be able to get stripped from the install so that the entire damn game doesn't have to be sent...
 
Timely thread. Was looking in my Doom game folder the other day thinking ... why store 6 languages I do not speak? Seven if you count two versions of Spanish. Considered deletion but thought better of it since I have no clue what I'm doing.

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USB thumb drives would be interesting. Though not likely considering cost to the developer. Would not like a disk option. Some of these newer games would require 15 or more DVD. Blue ray drives are not common as they should be.
 
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One really frustrating component is that, at least in the case of Steam, this approach is already a technical possibility. Ultra high def textures? Set it as a free DLC for optional download. Languages? While a little more advanced, titles like Final Fantasy XIII and Metal Gear Solid V (Both Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain) offer the ability to switch vocal language from English to Japanese (or back again) in their right-click "properties" menu, which prompts a new download. I grant that this would be better if it was an in-game setting, much like the textual language selection but at least it has been something! But yes, its true that improvements are warranted both on Steam and across the industry.

We need to fight the good fight against artificial transfer restrictions creeping in thanks to greedy ISPs both terrestrial and mobile, but that is a tertiary issue at best. Even if we can (and should) remain with unlimited (and net-neutral) monthly transfer, game developers and publishers could do more for efficiency regarding their titles. It is worth noting that console manufacturers hold a significant portion of the blame thanks to their policies. When Microsoft and Sony charge developers an inordinate amount of money for every patch/downloadable package made available on their networks, it encourages the "send it all in one load" mindset. However, thankfully the PC industry has another strength in being free of this kind of nonsense for the most part and when titles are made available on PC (and even platforms like Android) they should be tailored to efficiency of download and space requirements.

The best way to facilitate this is a push in the industry for tech that helps with this sort of efficiency. For instance, every client from Steam to GOG Galaxy and even direct downloads could support easy modular installs. What can be pushed as optional, install-on-demand, and especially lossless compressed content, should be. It is notable that the cracking/modding/piracy "scene" frequently does this for existing game titles, such as ripping unneeded languages or most impressively compressing an entire title down into spanned zips or in some cases a series of auto-extracting archives "repacked" to a MUCH smaller download size without losing any quality or features. Of course, this can be made easier by adding support for such features to various SDKs , APIs, and engines, to have this sort of thing seamlessly happen from inside the game, rather than requiring the user to go to a "properties" menu or 7zip something themselves. This kind of activity could be added to such user experience element as the "download as you play" parameter found on some titles/platforms, such as Blizzard's Battle.net.

Given that (quality) SSDs today become considerably more expensive once you pass the 256 / 512gb marker, a drive can fill up reasonably quickly with only a handful of 30-50gb+ titles. Playersd Even relatively limited scope titles like say, Killing Floor 2, a co-op zombie-killing FPS without tons of cinematic content or vast game data can begin at that size, to say nothing for major cinematic, open world titles, moddable, MMO or other demanding titles (Though Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, for all its open world cinematic nature and online gameplay, comes to around the same 30gb...but that's only with one voice language installed at a time!). While a certain amount of game size, both installed and downloadable, is required to provide high fidelity experiences, there is certainly some wasteful development and publishing attitudes like the article mentions that could be improved significantly if attentive to the issue.
 
The 1980s called and wants to push its front-end install program with options menu onto us again. Maybe we shouldn't hang up this time and actually listen.
We can learn a lot from history. Back then disk space was not cheap and bandwidth was practically non-existent, so install programs with options menu of what to install were mandatory. Nowadays disk space is (mostly) cheap, but bandwidth isn't. But still, why waste disk space for crap you don't need?
I can think of only one reason: Companies don't want to ask their users to understand what options they may want to install, so they install everything because it's easier on the user and the company in many ways. The effort to make the PC as a mainstream device for the masses (who are not very computer literate) has partially caused this problem as well.
 
Well said!

I think one of the things I've come to really be annoyed about with games, other than things which used to be features or content given away free in Patches now being called DLC (but that's a whole other rant entirely), is that Patches these days are not that simple and convenient file they used to be.

Before, you downloaded an EXE. It contained whatever was changed, which usually meant a new EXE plus some files. The games, while often were unpacked, did have 'database' archives to hold files back then. Doom with it's WADs, Quake with the PAK/PK# files, etc etc. When patched the updater would simply slip in and replace THOSE SPECIFIC UPDATED FILES into the archive. Now? Fallout 4 gets a mesh fix, a few textures, an updated EXE, and somehow we're downloading 400-700MB, all because they've decided to make you download the ENTIRE FRIGGEN ARCHIVE FILE! I often back up my files before I update, due to my poor connection, in case god knows what occurs which derps things. I've compared before and after, which more often than not the difference is a few hundred KB between the previous .BA2 and the updated one...

I blame Steam partially there, since I doubt it's in their policy to allow the download of EXE updates, purely to prevent auto execution of malicious code. So yes, I can understand the logic there, but it doesn't make it suck any less. Particularly when in the evening my download speeds can drop to... and I shit you not... 300kbit/s (aka ~38kb/s). That's why I typically leave Steam in Offline Mode, since you can't even tell a game to not update ever, anymore.

Oh and while we're on the topic of modular packaging.... Why do we have to download 130MB updates for Steam Client, when: I don't need their music library crap since I have a perfectly capable media player (foobar2000), I don't have anything for VR, I can't stand Big Picture mode, I don't need to Stream my games to another device, Live Stream my gaming session, nor do I use a GamePad to game with. Is it too much to ask for a nice 20MB Lite version of Steam?? :\ I'm not even asking for the default download to be the stripped down version either, as I'd be more than willing to jump through hoops to specifically get that download off their site. After all, it IS possible to cater to the masses while still keeping the minority happy, as long as a tiny bit of effort is made.
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The 1980s called and wants to push its front-end install program with options menu onto us again. Maybe we shouldn't hang up this time and actually listen.
We can learn a lot from history. Back then disk space was not cheap and bandwidth was practically non-existent, so install programs with options menu of what to install were mandatory. Nowadays disk space is (mostly) cheap, but bandwidth isn't. But still, why waste disk space for crap you don't need?
I can think of only one reason: Companies don't want to ask their users to understand what options they may want to install, so they install everything because it's easier on the user and the company in many ways. The effort to make the PC as a mainstream device for the masses (who are not very computer literate) has partially caused this problem as well.
Yep! And a big problem that this has caused now is inclusion of malware or additional download 'features' that get installed, because people these days have no concept of "install choice". They just click next until it's over, then wonder "Why do I have this 'Ask.com' toolbar." or "My browser has been hijacked when I try to search for stuff..."
 
I can certainly understand how most users wouldn't know the difference between texture packs. But languages should definitely be a pre download option. And that really would cut down a lot of disk space.
 
I know EFGSI English, French, German, Spanish, Italian I forget what the order of letters it is mostly English to German, French, and Spanish came about because publishers asked why do we have these other languages on the disk? So if you say live in France and speak french a little bit but mostly something else if the game comes out that all of your friends are playing and the jokes are in french, English, and German and you speak a bulkanzied language your friends would be talking about jokes that you might get if you understood the language but end up looking stupid because they think you don't understand say a meme... so many companies push to have as languages on the disk as possible not to limit their market because getting vo work done later is not the same you don't get the responses as the people laugh or ask what am I supposed to say? I know a lot of people in different countries and when gothic four came out the euro version for Great Britain and some of the Scandinavian countries had a lot more content.

As to the textures, you have something between two extremes spirtes which are card or single image that are always perpendicular to the camera to EXR style renders. A multipass render is likely going to be harder in real time but it is kinda what the FXAA shaders do, but a texture can be flat single color or it can be many parts that are layered together to create something that looks like what you see out a window. You start with a Lambert, diffuse, or flat shader, then you have a spectacular pass, which is white point on the surface and Fresnel shape meaning like the shape on car is long and thin like a crescent moon while a on a pupil is more square. You can have motion on a texture which means you have to store the math to how the shader moves across the surface in one and zeros that can be stored as an image map. Then you have the height map or bump map and or displacement to give the object texture. From there you can built textures that have transulences like skin and windows. skin almost always have three or four layers so show the veins underneith and sometimes to animate how the veins move and displace the texture to look like they popping out of the arm or neck...
 
old games used to do this whre you could select if you watned to install the entire sounds track or certain not so much neede media aspect of the game or run them off the CD.
Should work perfectly for games to day as well.
 
old games used to do this whre you could select if you watned to install the entire sounds track or certain not so much neede media aspect of the game or run them off the CD.
Should work perfectly for games to day as well.

That absolutely would not work as optical drives are slower you would start to reduce the game quality to save diskspace which is dirt cheap at this point for a gaming system. Games should constantly improve and not be hindered by people wanting to conserve space. This method worked on old games because they were midi files that were under 50KB in file size, also do you really want the humming of your optical drive or constant download the entire time you are playing a game?

Unless your comment was fully tongue-in-cheek in which case disregard mine. Sometimes it is difficult to detect sarcasm in text :)
 
meh, the games got larger and the allowed amount of DL data just got smaller, at least at Xfinity/Comcast where you're limited to 1TB per calendar month and if you go over they charge $10 per 50GB. Making game DL's smaller by allowing single or multiplayer only, etc seems a grand idea too me at the moment.
 
That absolutely would not work as optical drives are slower you would start to reduce the game quality to save diskspace which is dirt cheap at this point for a gaming system. Games should constantly improve and not be hindered by people wanting to conserve space. This method worked on old games because they were midi files that were under 50KB in file size, also do you really want the humming of your optical drive or constant download the entire time you are playing a game?

Unless your comment was fully tongue-in-cheek in which case disregard mine. Sometimes it is difficult to detect sarcasm in text :)

I think you missed the point. The point is we used to have modular games. Its technical possible to not have to have the entire game installed. I was not advocating using a CD ( come on CD...) but the fact that you can have a modular game design where you don't need to install it all.
Besides the facts that you don't think this works, clearly must be due to a low age, as again this is something that has been used for years.

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I think you missed the point. The point is we used to have modular games. Its technical possible to not have to have the entire game installed. I was not advocating using a CD ( come on CD...) but the fact that you can have a modular game design where you don't need to install it all.
Besides the facts that you don't think this works, clearly must be due to a low age, as again this is something that has been used for years.

Ill let it slide that your original comment made a crack at my age before you edit it. I see what you were saying, but my point was that optical media has not progressed to the point where it is as viable of an option to use as a data source for gameplay. Not to mention, is it not annoying enough to still use a disc on some games? I myself have moved past that and for the life of me couldnt tell you which side of my laptop has my dvd drive on it without doubting myself.

I guess I don't understand what you want, is hard disk space so precious to you that you would rather keep the giant book of discs next to your computer to swap in and out like its 1990 again? Or should we just let old habits of load lag waiting for the drive to spin up just die off and go buy another hard drive. Even hard drives on external with usb3 are faster than blurays.
 
Ill let it slide that your original comment made a crack at my age before you edit it. I see what you were saying, but my point was that optical media has not progressed to the point where it is as viable of an option to use as a data source for gameplay. Not to mention, is it not annoying enough to still use a disc on some games? I myself have moved past that and for the life of me couldnt tell you which side of my laptop has my dvd drive on it without doubting myself.

I guess I don't understand what you want, is hard disk space so precious to you that you would rather keep the giant book of discs next to your computer to swap in and out like its 1990 again? Or should we just let old habits of load lag waiting for the drive to spin up just die off and go buy another hard drive. Even hard drives on external with usb3 are faster than blurays.

I apologize for the crack at your age. I sometimes forget that tone of voice and facial gesture are missing with I'm making small fun digs and its easily appears like and insult. Hence the correction. Maybe i should learn to use smiley's more.

I totally agree that optical media is not optimal for this since most games use digital streaming. But again I think you are missing the point thought. You are focusing to much on the media... thats not what the post was about. Its about modular games. and the facts that it has been done before so it IS possible.
It was about the simple fact that there is no need to install/download the entire game to you HDD, and that giving people some options to chose what install size fits them the most, would be beneficial for the users

Full PCM audiotrack or AAC compressed (shaving off a few gig here)
Standard or high ress textures (Another few gig to shave off)
Multiplayer/campaing maps (Another gig to shave off here)
etc etc

The mentioning of CD was just evidence of the possibility and method has been in use prior, hence i talked about OLD games (as mentioned)
 
I apologize for the crack at your age. I sometimes forget that tone of voice and facial gesture are missing with I'm making small fun digs and its easily appears like and insult. Hence the correction. Maybe i should learn to use smiley's more.

I totally agree that optical media is not optimal for this since most games use digital streaming. But again I think you are missing the point thought. You are focusing to much on the media... thats not what the post was about. Its about modular games. and the facts that it has been done before so it IS possible.
It was about the simple fact that there is no need to install/download the entire game to you HDD, and that giving people some options to chose what install size fits them the most, would be beneficial for the users

Full PCM audiotrack or AAC compressed (shaving off a few gig here)
Standard or high ress textures (Another few gig to shave off)
Multiplayer/campaing maps (Another gig to shave off here)
etc etc

The mentioning of CD was just evidence of the possibility and method has been in use prior, hence i talked about OLD games (as mentioned)

I see now better what you are saying and can get behind that a bit. I think I remember doing too often loading a game into a virtual drive just to get away from disc lag and that is what I was picturing happening if they make the wrong items modular. I do like the idea of a 'tiered' game where maybe the high res or 7.2 audio is separate from the rest. Many games did do it this way, but also many would not and you get that (zzz zzz ZZZZ) as your drive searches for the audio snip for a character's next line in dialog which pauses the sequence because they opted to not even give you the option to install locally.

I think I do miss some aspects of the options and don't miss others.

Tried to read the article but it was a dead-end link, so read most of the comments instead, usually just as informative anyways :D

edited for typos, wine is strong tonight haha
 
I see now better what you are saying and can get behind that a bit. I think I remember doing too often loading a game into a virtual drive just to get away from disc lag and that is what I was picturing happening if they make the wrong items modular. I do like the idea of a 'tiered' game where maybe the high res or 7.2 audio is separate from the rest. Many games did do it this way, but also many would not and you get that (zzz zzz ZZZZ) as your drive searches for the audio snip for a character's next line in dialog which pauses the sequence because they opted to not even give you the option to install locally.

I think I do miss some aspects of the options and don't miss others.

Tried to read the article but it was a dead-end link, so read most of the comments instead, usually just as informative anyways :D

edited for typos, wine is strong tonight haha


You haven't seen how bad it can ben. i once worekd a a small netcafe after school hours. and they ran out of diskspace and refused to buy new HDD's so i had to go through all the game and figure out which would run directly from CD..
ever tried playing atomic bomberman running tottaly from CD.... :bored:
 
Ah first world problems.:p

I'm sure ISPs are loving inflating games sizes and 4k streaming video so they can up sell for higher data caps.

Reminds me early days when Intel loved when Microsoft released a new bloated version of Windows because invariably that would lead to more Pentium sales to run the "more X features" version of Windows.
 
Actually, right now, if you have a decent high speed internet connection, you only need to pay for a television connection because they have put a data cap on your internet connection.

What is really amazing to me is that so many people must realize this yet we still get raped by providers.
 
I tried to think of a couple games that did this and all of the mmo ones had problems. Stwor had a separate high resolution texture pack during the beta that bioware pulled at the last minute before launch. They later made it available but I think you to make sure if you ask for tier's you don't have a lot of people with slower machines demanding the art team not work at high resolution because they can't see the art on their machines... it is almost always better if they work with higher quality assets even if they original art never makes it into the game only optimized smaller assets make it into the game. Microsoft had problems with the xbox because to get the game to gold master you had to have the game limited to only what fit on the HD DVD roms. You could not have part of the game considered part of the game if it had to be downloaded because people who bought the game with out an internet connection could not be required to download parts of the base game. Anything extra had to be something microsoft could put on a disk for free and ship to those people with a valid purchase from a point of sale, at their own cost. So they basically said that anything else was download able content that you had to pay for at that point.

As to the actual coding the biggest problem is that if game installs all of it it expects it to be there, if you have to decide what to install it has to look at what is in the directories... which has positive and negative sides to it. One is overhead that runs while the game is running, I would rather have to buy an extra hard drive then lose those cycles to over head I might not have to use otherwise. Most games use acc not pcm, since to use pcm you have to use mpeg two not mpeg four. Mpeg four is free to use, Mpeg two costs licensing money, unless it is THX certified, which costs money to get certifed but you only pay once per edit to the code, I think. SWTOR when it came out was THX certified but some where along the line they stopped mentioning that.

MIP maps are what you do when you have a 4K plate and need to render to a 800x600 screen. Windows does not really support anything lower post windows two thousand. But they take up more space in video memory and system memory than on the hard drive unless you only use photoshop, because photoshop stores more information than you actually need in the images. A lazcos png which is a format that was created so that no one would have to pay to use the format since game developers were losing some much money to the guy who created jif then said gifs were jifs too... I still think he just wanted everyone to pay him for any images created, since before that we had jpeg, gif, bmp, ico, tiff, dib... but either way I can create an image that is 4k and compress it down using methods were all the pixels are still there to a couple megabytes or a 1920x1080 that is kilobytes in size and you can not tell the different between the open images. But adobe refused to license lazcos or any of the other compression algorithms then when they could afford it simply refused to as a matter of protecting their formats, since most of the algorithms are protected as copy right left or what is know as open source.
 
Thanks to the anemic CPUs in consoles we get uncompressed audio and textures for PC as well. Its plain simple.
 
Blue ray drives are not common as they should be.
They're not common because they're not used. DVD-ROMs only became commonplace because developers started requiring them. And some people bought them to watch movies on PC, but that's a very small fraction from the era when set top dvd players cost a fortune.
So if games started to come out on br discs instead of DVDs they'd start to become commonplace.
 
They're not common because they're not used. DVD-ROMs only became commonplace because developers started requiring them. And some people bought them to watch movies on PC, but that's a very small fraction from the era when set top dvd players cost a fortune.
So if games started to come out on br discs instead of DVDs they'd start to become commonplace.
Exactly.
 
The problem is you are assuming that the average PC gamer is as smart as you and will tolerate being told to "wait" as something downloads even though it is minimizing your HDD space. From a customer service point of view is better to tolerate bitching about big downloads or a litany of complaints caused by unintended consequences of modular downloads? One big download is a very KISS approach and probably why it sticks around.
OK, but they could at least leave out the language files for Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and God knows what other languages that are in there when all I want is the American English version.
 
OK, but they could at least leave out the language files for Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and God knows what other languages that are in there when all I want is the American English version.

Please prove how this would be better overall in a measurable way for the company. The company is providing a product at a price (its value) that you agree is worth it. So unless you are willing to pay for this feature (because it does require somebody to write the code and most likely have to increase customer service staff to field the added calls when it doesn't work right) then it has ZERO, or worse yet negative, value. Any company with 1 cell of brain power would say "nope, not doing it".

Now if you said a smaller download would somehow increase your purchases of the games by that company...then you got something. If not..nope, not gonna happen.
 
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What is that a picture of? It looks like a backdrop of downtown Cleveland, OH.
Road salt.
You can use google image search or in chrome just right click on an image and select "search google for image".
 
Road salt.
You can use google image search or in chrome just right click on an image and select "search google for image".
Well there's the Key Bank Building so I figured it was Downtown Cleveland, OH.
 
Doom 2016 is just under 77gb on my HDD. 6gb of which are languages I do not use.

Then there are some games I enjoy just as much that I had stored on 1.5mb floppys. How times have changed.
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Road salt.
You can use google image search or in chrome just right click on an image and select "search google for image".


That's what I thought it was, but I usually only ever see it covered so it doesn't wash away.
 
That's what I thought it was, but I usually only ever see it covered so it doesn't wash away.
I think google got the substance right but trparky nailed the skyline.
Like normal google, Google image search yields similar hit/miss mixed results. You still have to separate the wheat from the chaff.
 
It's not as norm as you may think. Where I live in ny you either have time warner cable or nothing, and many MANY people can't even get time warner because we live in the country. My only net connection is my phone, and I have to pay a ton for 60 gigs of data a month. I would love to have an alternative, but there are none. And there won't be because if I want twc on my road I have to pay them over 10 grand to just for the honor of paying them per month for cable. It's a lose lose situation.

I'm in a similar situation. Limited ISP really means things like this are extremely limited.

I don't have any problem with the storage space (even on PS4, which has anemic storage capabilities). But it takes me ~days~ to download a 50G game, during which I am not able to effectively do anything else on the internet. God help me when Win10 decides to update, everything stops. I often end up taking my device into work (which is on 25M cable).

I would love game launchers like ArenaNet has for Guild Wars - where it just downloads the bare essentials, and then streams the rest as you need it. That being said, if my ISP didn't suck so badly, it really wouldn't be that big of an issue. I appreciate that Steam at least lets me limit the times and download rates for automatic patches - that helps a lot actually, even though my Steam update queue never gets to the point where everything is finally updated.

It's almost like there are two internets - the Internet that people on cable and fiber have, where cloud services and HD video and on-demand are all over the place, and the Internet that rural and economically disadvantaged get, which is not much more than just email and web.

And with Day 0 multi-gig patch files, it's not like buying physical media is any better for people with limited internet.
 
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