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Comment by haritha-j | Hacker News Reader

I recently downloaded Hunt showdown. I think it was around 70 gigs. About a month later, I had to update it. The download was the same size. I think they literally just overrode the entire game because they were too lazy to update it properly.

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The opposite happens in some games where the update will be a gigabyte or two, but the patching takes so long, that some players with fast enough download speeds will swear by wholly uninstalling and reinstalling the game.

I observed this too with some other games. Really annoying, when you need to redownload tens of gigabytes , because they cannot be arsed to put a proper updater. Things that were solved by most games way before Steam became even big.

It's true for most of the modern web. Hardware and internet connections have come reliable and fast enough for many people not to care.

Unfortunately there are still people on metered/slow connections that really do care still.

This is true. I mainly live in a country with unlimited, fast internet but also spend some time in a country with limited and slower internet. But even when i have fast internet, downloading 70 gigs when I just want to play a game for an hour is very disruptive. I think a lot of this download and replace vs efficiently patch argument is predicated on the premise that the update itself was necessary. In many cases such as Forza horizon, I've noticed that the update is just to push a bunch of paywalled content / advertisements for new paywalled content that most people won't even play. I miss the days when I bought the DVD and that was the whole game.

This is why I stopped playing COD Warzone, every time I wanted to play I had to download the entire game again just because of some small update.

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