Is there anything on a PS-5 retail disk?

[romanof]

I got a nephew the PS5 game he wanted for his birthday which made me a favorite uncle for a while, but later in the day, I noticed that he was not playing with it and asked if it was not what he expected. The answer was surprising - for a non gamer. He was downloading required patches.

Turns out that when you install a game, it looks for updates and this one was something like 62gb. At least, the PS box said that is what was downloading. WTH? These are Blueray disks and hold what, 25, 50 or 100 gb, depending or layers?

Makes no sense to me. What is on the disk you buy, just a loader for the actual game? How can anything have a 60+ gb patch array unless the programmers are just lazy and send the entire program again rather than go to the trouble of making an actual update.

Just curious.

 

[salamanderjuice]

I got a nephew the PS5 game he wanted for his birthday which made me a favorite uncle for a while, but later in the day, I noticed that he was not playing with it and asked if it was not what he expected. The answer was surprising - for a non gamer. He was downloading required patches.

Turns out that when you install a game, it looks for updates and this one was something like 62gb. At least, the PS box said that is what was downloading. WTH? These are Blueray disks and hold what, 25, 50 or 100 gb, depending or layers?

Makes no sense to me. What is on the disk you buy, just a loader for the actual game? How can anything have a 60+ gb patch array unless the programmers are just lazy and send the entire program again rather than go to the trouble of making an actual update.

Just curious.

Depends. Most games have the game as it was on launch day on the disc. But most games these days get updates to fix bugs, improve performance, add content, etc. requiring patches to be downloaded. Some games also pack very little on the disc and just expect you to download most or all of it.

And even with the game on the disc patches can still be really big depending how the developer made the game.

 

[keksikuningas]

I got a nephew the PS5 game he wanted for his birthday which made me a favorite uncle for a while, but later in the day, I noticed that he was not playing with it and asked if it was not what he expected. The answer was surprising - for a non gamer. He was downloading required patches.

Turns out that when you install a game, it looks for updates and this one was something like 62gb. At least, the PS box said that is what was downloading. WTH? These are Blueray disks and hold what, 25, 50 or 100 gb, depending or layers?

Makes no sense to me. What is on the disk you buy, just a loader for the actual game? How can anything have a 60+ gb patch array unless the programmers are just lazy and send the entire program again rather than go to the trouble of making an actual update.

Just curious.

disc printing needs to be booked in advance and with the usual crunch and tight deadlines in the game industry, games are finished and polished while the 1.0 version is often unifinished (007 game that came out recently for example only has the first level on disc) and buggy but is already sent out for printing

 

[wonderings]

This is very common and I would say even the norm. My PS5 is in a back room that has bad wifi so I just generally do updates over night. Can be at times annoying if you want to play something but are required to update. I had that with a PS4 game I wanted to play on PS5. It was a WW2 Call of Duty shooter and not only did it have to download a game update the PS5 OS had to update as well to get the update.

 

[romanof]

This highlights a problem all across the industry and has been there from the start. Programmers work in surroundings that are not typical for many in the country/world. They have a monster PC with terabytes of storage and probably 64 gig of ram at the minimum. Their network connection is fiber and they would probably revolt if given a speed of less than a Gigabit per second. After a while, their setup becomes normal to them. Make a 48 gig update. No problem - how long does that take to load? 30 seconds, a minute or so at most. So what?

But out in the real world, their users and players are on a bandwidth limited plan. 48 or 64 gig is a good chunk of their monthly allotment. And most are definitely not on fiber. In fact, if they are on cable or some other shared network and they start the update or download in prime time, they might get an estimate of completion time in months, not minutes.

I have seen this for years. Way back in the day I would tell a developer that his updates were almost impossible to load because of the size. The answer was almost always, "Why don't you simply upgrade your plan, (dummy)? End of problem."

Great idea, if such an upgrade was available outside of the Tech hubs of the country. I would have paid almost any cost for an upgrade from a 26k dialup to a blazing 256k leased line. Alas, for many, no such upgrade was even in the pending. Nor, even now.

 

[Nermal]

Yeah, there seems to be a huge amount of waste these days. Recently on social media I've seen people upload static images as video, presumably with some music in the background (that I never hear because I don't have sound enabled). I shudder to think how much data is being used unnecessarily by that sort of thing.