Why PC Game Downloads are so Big

Deadly Ramon said:
The original Syndicate (1993) sure is a storage hog!

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That was one of my favorite games that I played on my Amiga 3000 back in the day.
I just couldn't get into it when I tried it last year or whenever I got the PC version.
 
Trepidati0n said:
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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I'm not sure if you're on the same page as everyone? Part of me thinks you are, but the way you started that comment off, it almost seems like you think they're suggesting to not not bother even making the other language packs.

Either way, I'm 33 years old and have been playing PC games since 1994. So while I am accustomed (trained) to dealing with installers for programs or games which allow for customization and find it a no-brainer operation, I still cannot conceive how it is you feel people would be too stupid to be able to execute a simple task like "Select Your Language" during the install of a game, Steam or otherwise. The Publisher doesn't even really need to do the coding work, either, technically speaking I mean. All they'd need to do is illustrate to the distribution service, Steam for example, which files are optional.

As it is right now, Steam ALREADY displays a window that requires you to confirm where you want to put the game. It's probably not much more work to add an additional Drop-Down choice that lists the languages the game has support for, and require your selection before continuing. Hell, to ease the process it can even DEFAULT to whatever your computer's language is set at! :p
 
Zepher said:
That was one of my favorite games that I played on my Amiga 3000 back in the day.
I just couldn't get into it when I tried it last year or whenever I got the PC version.
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I am a bit alarmed at how much my nostalgic recollection of playing old DOS/IBM/AMIGA games is much greater than my ability to enjoy those old games now. I still love older music and movies, but it seems that I've grown spoiled on more modern game engines and elements like mini-maps with guided quest objectives.
 
Uvaman2 said:
2 BD roms are perfectly resonable, heck even 4 single layer for 100GB is reasonable.
Don't see the problem.
ISP caps are crap none the less.
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Until the first patch, when you have to re-download a good portion of that anyway.

I don't necessarily have an issue with local media to ease downloads, but it needs to be better managed so that you aren't re-downloading everything every time they make a small patch, because if that is the case, then the local media become mostly useless.
 
Simple, just make the user pick which language they want and give them the option to download additional ones now or later. There goes a ton of space. But that's too much work for developers, so we are stuck with useless languages and audio files.
 
Deadly Ramon said:
I am a bit alarmed at how much my nostalgic recollection of playing old DOS/IBM/AMIGA games is much greater than my ability to enjoy those old games now. I still love older music and movies, but it seems that I've grown spoiled on more modern game engines and elements like mini-maps with guided quest objectives.
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I feel the same.
I was recently watching a play through of Ultima 6 Quest of the Avatar on the Amiga and it looks nothing like how I remembered the game. In my memory, the game looked really nice, but it really looks like crap now.

I still have an Amiga 3000T that I last hooked up years ago to play a few classic games like Lemmings 2 Tribes,
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Deadly Ramon said:
I am a bit alarmed at how much my nostalgic recollection of playing old DOS/IBM/AMIGA games is much greater than my ability to enjoy those old games now. I still love older music and movies, but it seems that I've grown spoiled on more modern game engines and elements like mini-maps with guided quest objectives.
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i'm reversed. the most played through game over the last couple of years is master of Orion (dos) and civ II (Win9x). i did enjoy doom 2016 though but a lot of newer games are way to one railraid tracked for me to enjoy as i love exploring and tinkering with the game and figure out stuff. but whne very shooter i just move from one room into the next room full of baddies its get borring pretty fast
 
Brian_B said:
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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Thats all very true. I ended up getting a surface pro 2 and installing steam on it so when I go to work I can get it to download off of the free WiFi for a few hours. Took me a week to get fallout 4's last dlc / patch.
 
Derangel said:
My first PC had a 5.25" floppy drive. I remember buying games that would come on those discs, right on the edge of the PC gaming industry switching over to the smaller disks. Those were certainly interesting times.
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my 1st "PC" was a Apple 2C with 2 5.25 floppies. I had about a hundred game floppies for it in big shoebox's. Karateka, Lode Runner etc etc. My next PC was a Packard Bell Pentium 75 with a 1.44 and a NEC 2X CD-ROM... now that was one heck of a jump. 850MB hard drive was mind blowing.
 
IMO a big problem is really garbage coding, I feel this way because we see companies do good work. For instance Blizzard has games like SC2 set up so that you can download just enough to get playing and then let the rest of the game stream in over time.

So why is it garbage coders? Because it seems to me that over the decades creative game developers have solved EVERY problem we encounter, the problem is for whatever reason when the next game dev picks up that same engine they just don't even bother utilizing the features the last game dev put in there. You can see this all the time in gaming where a bug that was fixed in one game pops up again in a newer game or many variants. Another example is DLC, DLC is already available for many games on steam and the same system that is used to allow you to control DLC should easily be able to be modified to allow users to pick language packs etc.... You also see this in GUI options, graphics options just left out time after time in games when the engine clearly supports it, then consumers have to go digging into the console.
 
They better keep getting bigger. It's a sign of more content, more high quality textures, more areas to explore, more more more.
 
JustReason said:
Seems Fallout 4 with the hi-rez dl is now up to 91Gb!!! I even have mods so mine is up to 121Gb. That is half of my SSD, lol.
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does the high res pack make a big difference visually? Does it have a big impact on FPS ?
 
Zepher said:
does the high res pack make a big difference visually? Does it have a big impact on FPS ?
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It does raise the minute detail level but the impact on all rig resources is rather large for the difference it makes. I am not using it currently as I removed it for now and already have a number of mods that raise the fidelity already and the HiRez DLC will likely get some mod love tweaking to help with the performance impact soon enough.

It was a valiant effort on Bethesdas part but seems a bit excessive. I may go and select what I want from the HRDLC and scrap the rest. I am even thinking of being one of the ones to fix it.
 
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