Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BatteryMountain | Hacker News Reader

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BatteryMountain

Another thing that changed from say 10 years ago, some games have better launchers and ways to configure them.

What I'm hoping to see at this front, since install sizes are bloating, that the installers/configuring becomes slightly more advanced.

When I install a game I want to be able to choose the following at install-time:

Texture Packs (main blobs that takes up a lot of space - why download 50GB if you need the 10GB version)

Language Packs

Voice/Audio Packs

Mode Packs (Single Player Campaigns, Multi player, maps)

This way you can take a game that currently cost say 80GB for everyone to average out 30GB to 50GB for most players. On the low end the same game needs to work at 10GB and at the high end can consume the whole 80GB for the person with hardware that can take it. Obviously for console players, they just want to play and get on with it and maybe wont enjoy the choices mentioned above, but PC and tweakers/benchmarkers/modders should enjoy it.

A 1TB SSD drive costs around 100 (€/ $). A person who enjoys tweaking their PC likely can easily get terabytes of storage space. I don't really see the utility of fiddling with 10GB here and there...

I wonder if it would be possible to get 250 GB SSDs for like $25 or less. You could then literally sell your game on an SSD. According to this [0] Nintendo charges $8-20 per cartridge to third parties.

Yeah, this is basically exactly what Nintendo is doing. I guess for PC and larger consoles you could use larger memory cards that might be cheaper to make. But anyway, it's still a problematic approach since it eats into the margins unless you increase the price of the game, which most game publishers try to avoid.

I really like Nintendo Switch cartridges, I prefer to buy physical copies when I can, but I don't think there's a future in them. I kind of wish someone would make "smart cards" that just gives you access to the game online. Since there's so many essential updates to games these days, that's almost what cartridges are anyway.

You forgot the reference link btw.

Given the popularity of digital sales it's hard to see the business model where this would make sense.

I have a bog standard internet connection with a download speed of 1000gb. Most games download faster than it would take me to go to the store or order a package.

Yes, https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000266629080.html - guessing that the AliExpress price is 2x the Taobao price which is ?x the quantity price. I do wonder how fast the controller/flash in this is, though (this is limited to SATA3) - that's now many times slower than the Series X / PS5 speed.

> "...literally sell your game on an SSD..."

That would be terrible from an archival perspective. Flash memory is subject to charge leakage that causes data be lost over time. High density flash, which has the lowest cost per byte, also has the poorest data retention lifetime.

A 1TB NVMe isn’t that cheap (though it’s getting there) yet, though. I’ll never go back to actual drives now I’m running 2x NVMe’s haha

Not everybody has gigabit FTTH. On a 25 Mbit connection waiting for humongous downloads really sucked when I wanted to play a bit of GTA 5 (not even online!) after not touching it for a few weeks.

Okay, imagine you have 300+ games on Steam/Epic/Gog etc... if you were to install 50 of them, that alone would eat up 1TB easy peasy. If you want to install more of them, a 1TB nvme drive is not going to cut it. Maybe 10TB either. So what do most people do? They install/uninstall frequently. But for those with crappy internet where 30GB take 2 days to download, it's better to make a backup before uninstall/reinstall. If the backups are smaller, that helps too.

So yes, 10GB here and there isn't much.. but as a collective, if you have 1000000 users downloading 300GB less per month (I know, silly numbers, it's way more in reality), it would make a huge difference to the "gaming industries & network load"-effects as a whole. Plug-in some real numbers (which I don't have)(Players X ave number games downloaded per year X ave game size).

Other industries like streaming/music sites, they optimize their transmission sizes and even small gains are often worth it (10 million people downloading 2MB less per song on spotify, while playing 50 songs per day... the numbers add up quick). Somebody will pay for the transmission - either the consumer or the business. The business only needs to ask is it cheaper to pay a few devs to optimize their code or is cheaper to pay for a fatter data pipe. I think long term, engineering effort always wins vs throwing money at the problem.

I don't have any stats so I don't know how large is this population who want to rotate through their Steam library with high cadence who lack fast internet. About the lack of fast internet - It feels like streaming and remote work have normalized "fast enough" internet connections of 100mb and up but I might be completely wrong here.

Complicated launchers often fail with proton.

So in steam, when you go into the properties of a game, there is a DLC's tab. When you select/unselect DLC's, it will often trigger a download to happen (although small). With Dota, they deliver support for OpenGL & Vulkan basically as DLC's.

So the mechanism to have modular game delivery already exists in steam, they can just repurpose it and give it a different label, or bake the options into the Install dialog so you can choose the parts you want upfront.

And yeah, other launchers are a pain (with proton), I agree.

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