I know shipping speeds are important, but it seems game developers could try harder with delta compressing their updates, because it's hard to believe a tens-of-GBs download is the best they could do when you already have a BluRay disk or something (unless it's new content, of course)
I wonder how much their bandwidth costs are and how quickly a reduction would pay itself.
Given the layers of encryption and obfuscation, and leaving aside the merits or otherwise of DRM in the first place, I can imagine it could be hard to do delta patching. At least, without making it easier to crack the DRM - e.g. you’d presumably have to decrypt the asset that needed patching, apply the delta, and re-encrypt/re-sign it all client side.
I'm not sure how viable this is today, or ever was: Many residential connections are heavily asymmetric. Players presumably aren't too excited either by the idea of continuing to seed while they already play online, with shitty ISP-provided routers suffering hundreds of milliseconds of bufferbloat whenever the uplink is saturated.
Yes, WoW used to have bit-torrent based update.
>Many residential connections are heavily asymmetric.
this is a US centric-view, though. For instance I have 300Mb up/down. At least for most of the Europe (and I suppose Asia), it's pretty common not to be restricted in any way.
I could leave a bit-torrent client non-stop and won't feel it. Like I've said: alas. There is some stigma associated with p2p/torrents.
While asymmetric connections make sense for many residential use cases, P2P is not one of them.
I live in Europe and I have a 1000/0.5 Mbit/s connection.
I've seen 20:1 offers on cable providers, but it's mostly marketing BS, as you're unlikely to get full download speed in most circumstances due to upload limitations.
I do reach the full downlink speed though due to (presumably) ACK compression in the modem and ACK synthesis/reexpansion in the CMTS. You are right that otherwise such a high ratio would not be feasible with TCP.
IME, the line starts to choke when you actually want to send requests and they compete with ACKs and your internet stutters and crawls in both direction. Though that was with a slower connection - it's harder to fill a bigger pipe.
BTW, is the ACK compression counted for consumers benefit?
No more ACKs? No more DL!
In the Philippines, 15 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up ADSL with a static public IP is not something that a foreigner could easily buy. Globe Telecom in Cebu asked for evidence that I have sufficient income to pay for this (2600 PHP per month), and their rules only allow documents from the Philippines, so my bank statement was rejected. I had to talk to their higher-level manager to negotiate an exception. And their default router has 2 seconds of bufferbloat, so I bought a TP-Link Archer C7 and installed OpenWRT to compensate.