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Cassandrich

There needs to be some kinda crackdown on "you need to download 15-100 GB every few days to keep playing something you already paid for". 🤬

Like, the legal requirement should be you can say no to new features and just not have access to them, updates only to components necessary to interoperate with server side changes to what you're already using. If new assets are required, option to fetch ultra low quality versions of them.

@dalias That is an unreasonable quantity of data.

@peteorrall My coworker plays Fortnite and it used to be a ~5GB update at most a couple times a month. Recently it's been 45 GB, 15 GB, etc. sometimes multiple times per week. 🤬 And even worse if you don't turn off high res textures.

@dalias Wowza! That's more than an operating system.

@peteorrall It's because they're incompetent at differential updates, don't care because they think everyone is in US with unmetered 100 gbit cable or fiber, and think everyone cares about UHD textures and 4k displays.

@peteorrall Yes, AAA gaming is utterly out of control bonkers. I hate it. There's no excuse for games to be more than a few hundreds of MB.

@dalias well, in case of EU, there is some.... action going on the right direction, it would seem:
stopkillinggames.com/eci

Technically, it's rather about "pulling the plug", but still.

www.stopkillinggames.comStop Killing Games

@dalias analogous issue: security fixes vs new features for versioned software releases

@dalias I read a thing a while back that at least some of these oversized updates are caused by studios not properly doing rebuild-if-changed on their assets for making delta-updates, and changes to oodle's compressor heuristics causing a different bitstream to be generated and thus counted as a "delta" even if most of the actual underlying data didn't change at all...

In other words, I think if anything is to be legislated, it's that efficient delta-updates should be used, such that files are not rebuilt if the inputs didn't change...

(I'm somewhat baffled that some modern game build systems are managing to be worse than make at efficient delta builds...)

@becomethewaifu I'm not surprised. The biggest problem is that they don't care. It's an industry where "fuck you, your PC/internet/whatever sucks" is the norm.

@dalias who even has that kind of internet connection…

@mirabilos GaMeRz*! Lol

* with rich parents, living in major US suburbia.