Disconnecting the Playstation 5 from Internet installs DVD games faster | Hacker News Reader

Disconnecting the Playstation 5 from Internet installs DVD games faster

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134 pointswslh129 comments

According to the comments there it seems the console is downloading the bulk of the game from the online servers rather than off the disc, when connected to the internet, rather than waiting for the disc installation then downloading patches.

So I suppose for the users affected their connection is slower than pulling off the disc.

Probably due to day-1 patch :( so the disc is ‘out of date’.

This is a good reason to wait for "gold" editions etc. Not sure if they still sell 'em but you would get a patched version that is actually done.

A bonus is that typically only good games get those 'complete' or 'director's cut' editions so you won't be wasting time on crappy games.

If I were working on such a thing I'd want the patch to be downloaded as the smallest possible delta from what's on the disc.

Call of Duty updates are 200gb regardless of pre existing installs. It’s absurd.

Some Call of Duty discs contain basically no data at all.

>Game disc only contains 1GB of data (In some regions it has even less data on disc) forcing you to download a 40+GB patch (at launch) and another 40GB of data packs in order to play the game.

https://www.doesitplay.org/game/Call%20Of%20Duty%3A%20Modern...

That is a nice site. I was first made aware of this issue with Switch games. Some publishers will cut content on the memory card and force a download to stop their game requiring a card with larger capacity which costs more.

These aren't even new games that it is reasonable to expect to be patched. Re-releases like "Spyro Reignited Trilogy" require a download which is just a cost saving exercise.

It’s also an plausible anti-leaks measure - if the gamecard contains everything needed to play the game, the game can easily leak early when the cards are going to retail.

If a day1 patch is required, then it can’t leak until that patch is available?

day -1, not day 1

Actually it’s called day one patches. Similar to zero day vulnerabilities (in the name sake only) these patches are usually required to play day 1 of the game…

example: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/why-you-should-want-d... (Only linking this article for it’s referencing them as day one patches)

another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms#d...

if the cart/d isn’t playable as-is, you only bought a license, and eventually the game itself won’t be available.

but that’s ok, the next console will likely have a re-re-release.

I wonder how many publishers use S3 for this. Because, at current retail (quantity 1) prices, a bigger card looks like it will pay for itself after a whopping two downloads.

I assume that the game downloading ecosystem uses something that’s actually cost-effective. At AWS prices, it seems like it would be basically impossible to be a profitable publisher of multi-gigabyte games at any scale.

Each of the console manufacturers operates their own CDNs, typically. Valve do too on PC.

They often have some kind of proof-of-ownership (like a license ticket) required to download game data or updates, too.

That also has the effect of preventing pre-release leaks, though as we've seen some of Nintendo's own games shared on the internet weeks before release I don't imagine it's a big part of the reason for requiring a download.

Tears of the Kingdom leaked a week or so early from the cart, full game.

Yes, that's one of the games I'm referring to.

Are delta patches still viable given the current sizes of games? I'm not sure if this is the state of the art, but according to https://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/, bspatch would require more memory than most systems can offer.

You would probably do the deltas in batches. Not input the entire disc in a single chunk.

I'd expect the patch generation to be memory hungry, not the patch aplication, which should be only data and offsets. If it uses maximum compression it might generate a huge data dictionary, but since it has to be distributed too, that would be contraproducent to patch size.

Since figuring THAT out might require reading the whole disk and doing byte by byte comparisons (or a whole disk checksum), easier to just download the whole thing.

Unless they track literally every single DVD variant perfectly, which ain’t happening.

And that is ignoring that many disks are basically just a hardware license dongle, and don’t actually have a full playable version of the game.

You can't imagine a patch format that avoids this? It sounds like you lack some creativity.

If you need to lookup patches by pre-patched hash of the source file, you could, for example, precompute hashes and store them on the disc.

It’s an info theory thing. But nice try. Why don’t you propose something better? Besides what I already proposed anyway.

The ways to optimize/‘solve it’ all require degrees of rigor in information control and tracking that aren’t realistic given the market conditions and supply chains.

At least unless people stop being okay with paying for $40+ games that download 40G patches anyway. Which would require severe changes in trajectory of bandwidth availability, which isn’t likely.

No sir, excuse my bluntness but you are full of shit trying to claim that information theory blocks this from being practical. I worked on stuff like this. I worked on the format that Windows setup uses for installation media for example. It has delta patches too. I think the same exact idea used there would work. It has a hash of every file precomputed and only stores what's unique.

HN rated limiting sucks. And client crashes suck more.

You’re not reading my comment, or thinking about the game distribution problem.

MS can get benefit from reading all the files, verifying hashes, etc.

And in a typical OS update scenario, MS can trust that a files contents haven’t been updated since the hash was checked. Which reading from a DVD/BluRAY, scratches are a problem and it isn’t that simple.

Games typically don’t, especially those on a DVD or BluRAY. Because they are slow, and have terrible seek times.

So, like I pointed out - it doesn’t make sense to do the work you need to do in info theory to actually apply a delta patch in these scenarios.

The file format I was describing is used in the Windows DVD. I'm sure you know more about it than I do.

And as noted, windows has a lot of use cases games don’t. Which is why essentially nobody does what it does.

Also, windows updates take forever - as you’ve probably noticed.

I mean, zsync? Performing simple hashes of blocks of data isn’t exactly hard for the console. On the CDN side, just add a caching layer for the resulting chunks and it should sort itself out, since there are only so many variants of the source disc. It won’t get you the best compression ratios, but it’s flexible. We were considering this for firmware updates of an IoT product. It’s not like differential updates are unheard of.

For that sync to work, you have to read the whole disk, do hashes, then compare to hashes for a given other version. Which requires reading the DVD/BluRAY (slow) and comparing to the versions on the server.

And preferably, if you’re just reading hashes off the disk, that none of the actual data on the disk is corrupted or doesn’t match the hashes.

And then, due to the reality of the way games are distributed, downloading 90%+ of the game anyway.

Or just download the full version, which is simpler and likely the same amount of bandwidth, and faster since you’re not having to read/check the slow disks for more than basic ‘is it this game’ checking.

I understand the types of considerations that may make console developers not bother, but also it is a bit ridiculous on its face when they are selling physical media. But for patch-heavy games like CoD, maybe it’s a lost battle anyways, archival be damned.

But I will push back a little and say that a zsync-like differential update scheme would still be totally feasible. BD read speeds are going to be in the 100s of megabits per second, and the compute for the hash is free (ie. It’s I/O bound). You can parallelize and start downloading blocks before you’re done hashing every block on the disc. It seems likely to me that you’d still end up better off with this scheme if you have slower than gigabit download speeds (which is true for the vast majority of the US). Zsync is fairly coarse and flexible, and essentially looks like BitTorrent between two peers over HTTP if you squint. If you assume the download speed and network reliability is the bottleneck that outweighs things like disc I/O and compute, it essentially degrades gracefully to just downloading the entire update in the case that there are zero matching blocks.

Edit: I should mention that another key aspect of the setup is that there are a small number of printed disc revisions, and a small number of target download (most people will get the same game files for a given region). This means that a CDN cache will quickly find the hot blocks to serve, even without any precomputation of the diff between source and target.

Most games, near as I can tell, the version on the DVD/BluRAY for the initial release is pretty much never finished - often barely playable. Even at 'release' date, the initial update is often at least as large or larger than the data on the DVD/BluRAY.

So possible? Sure, almost anything is possible with enough work and tradeoffs. It just isn't economical or likely actually faster given current bandwidth constraints and how they're distributed.

Especially if you consider that if there is network play, they'll have to be up to date anyway or most games won't let them connect, so 'offline' play is going to be a relatively rare situation. So why optimize for it?

There was some multiplayer FPS a few years ago that had a day 1 patch that was larger than the game itself.

You may be thinking about Fallout 76, but this has happened with a bunch of games already.

The patch download shows up as a download once you put a disc in for installation. The console still installs from disc and you can usually play without the patch. I actually had a game that failed to install from disc, the replacement disc worked fine. So unless this is something very recent I have no idea why an internet connection would have an impact on disc installations.

Some of us have *really* slow internet connections, such that the much smaller day one patch is still going to take a quite long time to download. Much longer than the full installation from disc.

> So unless this is something very recent I have no idea why an internet connection would have an impact on disc installations.

Not everybody is on the same network segment with the game provider. /s

Downloading GB for every game updates is just sick. But ... we have Teams.... /s

I’d be willing to bet that they check if there was an update and then just proceed to download the game at latest version. Would have to test it with a brand new release though.

The game as shipped on disc will generally already be out of date on launch day, with day 1 updates waiting for download. Over time these have started to comprise the bulk of the game itself.

These days it makes no sense to actually copy anything off the disc when you'll have to redownload the entire (updated) build off Sony's servers.

These might be the last consoles that ever have disc support.

That's too bad. No disc equals no buy. Own or die.

I just switched over to PC gaming since I trust Valve a lot more than I trust Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony. My Steam account is 18 years old and I can still download my earliest purchase from 2005.

Valve isn't really different, PC gaming is different. Almost all games are available via piracy, no matter if Valve still offers a game. This includes games like the recently unlisted Spec Ops The Line, where the barriers are entirely legal.

Xbox people have said quite openly that the releasing everything on PC is their game preservation strategy a few times.

There are even better stores in this regard, like GOG or Itch.io. With those, you can just download the DRM-free installers which will work even if the store goes bankrupt tomorrow. Surprisingly many games are available, even some AAAs, not just indie stuff.

yes but GOG has recently started to not respect the DRM free aspects by accepting games that have restricted online multiplayer modes. Still they are better than most other stores.

I don’t think they ever had a requirement that every game have no DRM, and I also think that online games are obviously a temporary experience whose very nature isn’t compatible with the idea of DRM-free.

If they can’t ban players and bots they won’t survive.

IMO the paranoid focus way too much on DRM.

And you can still purchase new games for PS3 on the console. The only thing you have to do is fund the account elsewhere since Sony doesn’t want to support payment security on the PS3.

Only because there was a big backlash. Sony tried to close the PS3 and Vita stores back in 2021 but reversed course.

Even if the backlash and reversal wasn’t there, you’d still be able to play your purchased games and I believe they were going to keep redownloading functional.

Use GOG when you can, it's DRM free (mostly).

You can get DRM-free games on Steam too. For example Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam is DRM free.

I don’t look at these things in such a black and white way.

Gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies one can have. A $70 AAA game costs less than one mediocre dinner out. And I don’t even personally buy any games at that full price, I try to buy games that cost less than a Starbucks run.

In my entire nearly 20 years gaming on Steam I’ve only spent something like $4,000 on PC gaming software. Steam tells me this in an account report. That’s less than the average American spends on their car in just one year - for a depreciating asset that is eventually worthless.

The percentage of games that have been “revoked” has been minimal. I am aware of some delisted games like a particular multiplayer-only tech demo-ish title that I enjoyed (Shattered Horizon).

My old Nintendo eShop games on previous consoles can’t be redownloaded but they can still be backed up and played and I’ve always received ample advanced notice.

To me, “own or die” is quite dramatic and would be overbearing on my hobby. I recognize that all these experiences are temporary. I can’t go back in time and play Skyrim like it’s the first time I played it. That experience has depreciated. If I go back and play a game like Red Steel it will be pointless because the game is better at representing a point in time in video game development rather than a game that is worth playing in 2024.

Don’t be surprised if the next consoles ditch discs entirely, but my advice to any gamer is to not let that line in the sand stop them from enjoying what they enjoy. Because this hobby is cheaper than basically anything else you can do in real life that is far more ephemeral.

> A $70 AAA game costs less than one mediocre dinner out

Either in USA the cost of life is very strange, or you are making up numbers.

At 70$ per person in expensive western europe it would be a VERY VERY FANCY restaurant.

Also eating isn't a hobby.

You can buy a decent guitar for 500€ and use it for the next 50 years. Which can't be done with games you don't own since they disappear.

For 2 people $70 is pretty middle of the road restaurant in 2024. ($35 a piece)

I went somewhere (slightly) fancy and it was slightly over $100 for 2 people with drinks. I live in an expensive area though (around Boston)

I think in cost per hour games are a great value if that 70$ game holds your attention for 20+ hours. I suspect 500 Euro gets a pretty great guitar.

I guess you spend money where it’s important too you.

You normally count per person not per n amount of people.

Depends. If I'm considering it entertainment, then it isn't unreasonable to think about how much I would have to spend for it to be entertaining.

I don't normally eat by myself and would be paying for my wife to join me, and therefore it's the cost of two meals.

Wouldn't then it be fair to count 2 game licenses as well?

Absolutely. There are many games I've had to play double for to play them with friends/family.

So it's $140 dollars for 2 in the comparison. Right?

Depends, a lot of games I buy only require the one purchase for two people to play on the same screen.

Maybe it’s just my phrasing but I consider the “slightly fancy” places you mentioned ($35/person) to be mediocre, not in the “it was bad” sense, just in the sense that it’s nothing particularly special and that it would be a meal that I could easily surpass at home with my own home cooking.

To me a fancy/good/special meal out is something that only a culinary school-trained chef with access to the restaurant supply chain can actually pull off.

I’m also thinking you didn’t include tax and 20% tip. “With drinks” implies at least two drinks per person? Or are we rationing, one per customer here? Do you tell your date they can’t order another glass of wine or can’t touch the cocktail menu, American light lagers only?

$50 a person with two drinks including tax and tip is like an evening at a chain restaurant like Texas Roadhouse or the Cheesecake Factory. Maybe not even that, you might even have to step down to Olive Garden.

Eating isn’t a hobby but eating out with service sure is.

No matter, this is all pedantry on your part. I already showed you that my ~$250/year gaming budget is relatively modest, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t ever stop myself from buying a game I’m interested in.

If you have a single Netflix no-ads Ultra HD account you’re spending about the same cost on content you don’t get to keep the moment you shut the subscription off.

Hell, Amazon Prime charges $140 a year for basically nothing and 200 million people eat that shit up for breakfast.

You've never been to europe in your entire life, and here is a rant teaching me how I should behave and do things in my continent, a place where you'd stand out like a japenese in southafrica.

> for a depreciating asset that is eventually worthless.

And that's where you lose me. I have games from my childhood I still play. Some of those games are worth many times more than what I paid for them back then.

Video games are art, not a consumable you can charge by the hour for.

I’m not saying that I want them to be consumables that disappear from my library.

What I am saying is that, in practice, my digital game library hasn’t worked that way. Even the most egregious shutdowns (ahem…Nintendo) have left me with a way to save my purchases.

And even if I’m screwed over, I’ll still not feeling very screwed over versus the amount I paid and the enjoyment I got. Or even if I’m really screwed there’s probably a trivially easy workaround like emulation.

> I have games from my childhood I still play

I think they are talking about modern games that do not have an endless shelf life like older ones can. With always-on DRM (like the game mentioned in the article), or games tied to an online service (where servers inevitably shut down like GameSpy or Destiny), or older games purchased on a market that closes (like WiiU shop or M$ book shop recently), you effectively lose access to the game forever.

Of course there are exceptions like Battlefront 2 where patches update ancient games or emulators that allow playing older games, but this isn't the norm for PC games.

The main thing consoles had over PC gaming for me has been that I can buy a used game and then sell it when I’m done with it.

I used to think that way until I realized that basically all games depreciate into dust unless they have the magic “Nintendo” on the box.

Now I consider physical games to be a non-paying tenant in my limited real estate.

I just sold the FF7 remake for PS5 for over $50. I lost a few bucks in shipping and such but it was a good return for a game I probably wouldn’t play again

> No disc equals no buy. Own or die.

You seem to imply here that "disk=buy", but that's not even remotely true anymore. I don't know anything about this game, but it seems like this is yet another one that doesn't work offline [1]. So having the disk still doesn't mean you own it.

There are still games where disk=own of course, but using that as your metric of ownership would be incorrect.

1: https://old.reddit.com/r/granturismo/comments/110chtg/can_i_...

It also depends on if patch is incremental or it replaces existing data in bulk

My issue is games are going all of the above and they are not any more fun than the older ones. No new gameplay features that require the above either. What about the graphics? None of this requires you to ship incomplete and out of date products to the customer. People talk like this type of behavior is necessary and required to ship a game.

On the ps3 or ps4, using google's dns speeded up network downloads :)

Does anyone suspect Sony of knowing how to make online services?

Well, they seem to know better than Nintendo…

they do know how to make rootkits

Can I get the source for that? And any sourcecode + how they legally got away with it in court?

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5514-2/

it's a pretty old story at this point but you can start from here?

Why would you expect them to get in legal trouble? As long as it's covered in the EULA software can do whatever it wants to your computer.

Their rootkit famously installed even if you rejected the EULA, so they did get in trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

It's sad that those stories get forgotten.

Like IE6, or Microsoft bullying and corruption.

HP conning users with their printers.

Apple iphone home button scandal.

It just means bad actors can abuse clients again and again, and with a little PR and some time passing, they can get billions in without consequences.

Given that the last one they shipped was 19 years ago, I’m not sure that expertise still exists in-house.

That sounds like a problem with your default DNS server, it's not like Sony provides one.

ISP DNS can be dumb and confuse CDN geolocation.

When I lived in Malmö my ISP DNS would result in Akamai CDN content being served from Stockholm rather than Copenhagen which was a lot closer and faster.

When I switched to 1.1.1.1 this problem went away

It's not that they're dumb, it's more that geolocation is just guessing. There will be mistakes and edge cases and setups which can't be geolocated. The only dumb part here would be providing a service where you can't override the download server. (Or relying entirely on the DNS rather than probing the speed)

> it's more that geolocation is just guessing.

Does DNS care about geolocation?

It measures distance in b/s dose it not?

You can have DNS with different answers provided to different locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDNS The issue starts when you move from your hotspot to your wifi and keep the cached results. Or your ISP has a large address pool that's used between multiple states/countries. Or the caching DNS server gets a different answer than you would get directly. Or ....

It's a mess.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDNS

I did not know that

Is it widely used?

> ISP DNS can be dumb and confuse CDN geolocation.

Or they have a vested interest in keeping customers hitting specific locations which may be suboptimal for the end user.

Around here some rather have you stay in their preferred AS as much a possible and stick to DCs in Paris than Frankfurt (to direct peering?), even though FRA is a stone throw away. This conveniently disappears when using ISP-independent DNS (at the cost of sometimes, some regional-specific content not being primed in the CDN, which I think is why sometimes downloads start slow then shoot way up).

e.g tested quickly today with mtr:

- Home to Akamai PAR1 = 8 hops:

  1-5: ISP, 5 hops
  6-7: Zayo, 2 hops 
  8: Akamai intx-par1

  best: 22, worst: 80, stdev: 10

- Home to Akamai FRA1 = 4 hops:

  1-2: ISP, 2 hops
  3: Akamai intx-fra1

  best: 27, worst: 51, stdev: 4

Yet my ISP DNS consistently throws me towards PAR1. In practice this results in general jitter and reduced throughput (ranging from two-thirds to one third; e.g Xbox game downloads never go above 200Mb/s on par1 but shoot up to 600Mb/s on fra1).

Seems more likely to be a random issue with where the dns resolver is located. Playing with the egress of your dns server like that is sad, would be interesting if you were right. Considering how badly ISPs manage DNS it is most likely incompetance.

I don't think they have nearly that much control over other random sites' choice of anycast.

It was something about their CDN. May have been fixed now, the ps5 downloads at full speed, and I think the ps4 did too before i retired it.

If google would work, I could find the old forum threads about the problem. But not any more.

Oh I probably should have mentioned. The problem seems to have been global. Not any particular ISP.

I work for an ISP and have user-facing support tickets for "slow speeds on Playstations" happen.

First thing we do is pop the hidden browser on the console (if it's a PS5, where they decided to "remove" the browser) and run a speed test and it'll pull full rated speed of whatever service we throw at the user.

I can pull full wire speed from North America to Cape Town on a Playstation but god forbid you try to download from PSN in the same country. Doesn't matter what DNS we've used - be it our internal, Quad9, etc.

My favorite part is that installing games from the internet is technically more expensive for Sony than installing a game from the disc, because they pay a larger network transfer costs.

Is there some spyware involved? Is this just incompetence? Is there another reason for this design?

Someone probably just assumed it would be better user experience not having to patch after install. That just doesn't work out when the user's network isn't as good.

I think _in general_. Games are stupid big now.

I'm amazed we're still on discs as physical media and not usb keys. Speed (), size, and capacity would all be greatly improved. It would be a bit like the cartridges of old.
I guess it must be a cost thing.

USB3.0 can theoretically do a 25GB blue ray in 50 seconds, 3.1 is half that, and 3.2 half again.

At one point, I know neither Microsoft or Sony deployed patches as binary diffs. Depending on what assets get patched, it might be faster to download the latest available version instead of installing from local disc and then patching to current as the "patch" may be similar size to fresh install.

unless the game is legit unplayable from disc, you can get players into the game and download it in the background.

It's not incompetent or even more expensive if you assume network bandwidth is a fixed cost.

Why would we assume network bandwidth is a fixed cost? Everyone pays for network transmissions.

Kind of, but not that simple. You can pay for contracts where you commit to using x PB of traffic over some period at a heavily discounted rate or agreed amount, then pay extra over that. You can even have commitments, where if you don't use as much as you promised, you pay penalties for the difference. In edge cases, it becomes cheaper to waste some bandwidth in a given month/quarter.

> Is there another reason for this design?

Ah, but if Sony uses the disc drive to install the game then they might have to pay royalties to whichever soul-sucking, rent-seeking company owns the rights to the blu-ray format, whoever they are.

So, Sony.

People have already forgotten the Blu Ray vs HDDVD format roles huh...

Perhaps I should have made my sarcasm more obvious. :P

It's funny you say that as the whole reason the Xbob 360 used HD-DVD was to avoid paying Sony the royalties for Blu-Ray.

>Xbob 360

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

I'm sorry, this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Sony was always heavily involved with optical discs, like Qualcomm is with phone modems. 44.1kHz sampling rate of audio CD famously comes from components reused from one particular Sony product that predates CD.

Press 1 million discs, sell 500k discs. Price of those 500k unsold discs is several million dollars. Pressing discs is a huge risk. Don't press enough and you lose sales. Press too many and you lose money. Online has no such issues.

DVD? that's 3 generations ago

They meant physical disc

The ps5 uses bluray

Modern AAA games are so huge that I don't even bother installing them anymore. I only play classic and indies nowadays. If I want to watch a movie I watch a movie, I don't play games to watch a bunch of movies.

CPR - Completely Personal Rant: ALL modern AAA games are 80% garbage. Yeah! Downvote my however you want. I don't care how much time you spend on optimizing those engines or making those assets. I *hate* the "progress" of modern graphics programming.

I don't think this is such a hot take. It's well known that publishers' AAA definitions are trash. Look at Ubisoft and their recent attempt at feeding people the AAAA concept to justify pricing while delivering another mediocre experience. Now everyone makes fun of them because while their game world is huge, it is still incredibly bland. If you want good experiences, you have to sift through all the marketing and propaganda first. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to limit yourself to casual and indie games.

what game are you referring to?

AAAA Games? I believe that was the term Ubisoft's CEO used for Skull and Bones, mainly to justify the 70$ price tag

It's also becoming very apparent that the studios can't support the level of investment their having to make to develop AAA either. A bit like the movie studios, dropping billions on titles that can only make money back if they manage to be the #1 hit of the year.

Well, the total gaming industry is almost 10 times bigger than the entire movie industry. So it actually makes more sense to try and create a hit game than a hit movie. We already have seen two new surprise super hits since the start of the year on steam. When was the last surprise hit like that from a big movie production? Probably the Mario movie from almost a year ago.

The Xbox Game Store has a "less than 1GB" category. It includes games you'd probably consider AAA. Certain categories of games like open world shooters are massive downloads but there's lots that aren't.

Nah, 80% of modern AAA games are 100% garbage :)

A tiny few of them still justify their size. Witcher 3 and Elden Ring come to mind.

Other than that, "more is better" seems to be a disease.

I mostly agree with you, I straight up dropped World of Final Fantasy after I was 10+ hours in and still mostly just watching cutscenes.

They're not as good as movies and they're way longer too. It's like these game producers really wanted to be movie producers.

Mass Effect is a perfect example. I recently played through ME1/2/3 on the PS4 remake and am now playing through ME: Andromeda, so I've gotten to experience all that evolution in a few months.

ME2 was probably the sweet spot, the further you get into the series the more it becomes about the wow factor rather than the gameplay and the characters.

Yeah, I started with ME2 and really liked it. ME and a few others are among the few AAA games I enjoyed to play.

Many people have internet speeds faster than the ps5 blu-ray drive read speeds.

But that internet connection is usually shared between many devices. Kids watching their youtubes, wife catching up on her tv shows, washing machine uploading gigabytes of data to some unknown remote server.

And many more don't, so it shouldn't be the default or at least automatically switched based on internet speed.

If the download includes a patched version of the game, the users may be better off since they'll need to download the (likely gigantic) patch anyway.

But indeed it would be nice if the console asked first.

Maybe.

Maybe not.. Do you have market research to back up your claims?

I would guess that your experience is less true than you think, additionally it's not just your supposed internet speed at play here, it's of course disk speed of your machine, disk speed of their machine, every hop you need to hit to get to their CDN; and then you should pray they use a CDN, those are expensive and there's no financial incentive for Sony for you to have a fast download. :)

Beware the ignorance of thinking that your internet connection to your ISP is the only thing that matters regarding internet access.

Strictly speaking, a Blu-ray is not a DVD. I only mention it because the original author did not make the mistake but the HN submitter did.

Hardware companies don’t do software good.

does ps5 use compression when downloading off the internet and not when installing from disk?

Probably by design to make a smaller attack surface. There are no exploits known that come from game discs on ps5. But Sony may know something we don’t.

https://www.psx-place.com/threads/update-2-thefl0w-discloses...

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240205-18-year-old-vulner...

You can still install from disc by unplugging it, though, so is it that much of a real reduction in attack surface?

I agree with you that attack surface doesn't strike me as a likely answer as to why this is the way that it is. But, who is going behind their PS5 and unplugging it from the network to install a game and then plug it back in again? I don't think the majority of people will be doing that, but I have no source behind that hunch besides general human laziness.

The attack surface console makers are typically concerned about is one which the users have control over - jailbreaking the restrictive OS to customize the software, run custom software, and potentially run pirated games. So, if there were a method to do so through the disc drive, users would indeed go through the relatively minor effort of temporarily unplugging the console to force the disc to be used. Thus, what they're doing wouldn't reduce the attack surface at all.

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