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.