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.
It is extra work for them so they make more money by not having a team implementing a patching system that can handle distributing only the changes. They just don’t care.
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.
Meh. Ranged download is a thing.
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.
It is extra work for them so they make more money by not having a team implementing a patching system that can handle distributing only the changes. They just don’t care.
They probably encrypt the packages so one small change changes the whole file.