My batting average is obscenely high if I can toot my own horn for the briefest of moments; from calling the Half-Life sequel to nailing the release date of Terraria Journey’s End, both well before official announcements, it’s starting to appear that I simply cannot be wrong. My latest and greatest endeavor would be calling the newest anti-piracy as reaching beyond Denuvo, as game file sizes are simply becoming so staggeringly large that most pirates simply can’t keep up, while game download streaming services such as the Steam platform, Origin, and Battle.net launchers giver users a bit more flexibility when dealing with large file sizes.
Torrent trackers struggle to maintain higher file sizes without losing parts of the download, meaning that users are stuck waiting for weeks to pirate larger software packages. Not to mention the need of having enough space on their system to even hold the package; while hard drives become exponentially cheaper as time progresses, pirates aren’t necessarily known for having disposable income.
By this reasoning, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare may be one of the most difficult titles to pirate as it now has the largest file size in the history of PC games at a whopping 190GB. That number is only going to continue to escalate as more patches and content is stuffed inside of the title during post-launch support. While PC flight sims can arguably break that record, those files can be piecemeal downloaded depending on what the user wants to experience; it isn’t a mandatory 200GB+ download to merely launch the game.
Yet precisely what comes with that 190GB has some paying customers frustrated, as they’re stuck downloading (and updating) segments of the title that they are simply uninterested in, whether that may be the single-player campaign or the blisteringly fast multiplayer; all 190GB must be downloaded to stay up to date.
This poses a unique problem to the developers at Infinity Ward as CoD continues its apparently inevitable journey towards needing a full TB of space; should they offer piecemeal downloads of the title as a whole to allow paying customers to manage the package?
Simply requesting a full 190GB (which again, is likely to increase as time progresses) is a bit ostentatious, if not entirely disconnected from the PC gaming community’s needs and wants. Yet other titles are quickly approaching that figure, and easily breaking it if we’re including mods. With Skyrim alone I regularly break 200GB using mods, and ARK: Survival Evolved can reach a TB if you’re running a server, including mods and custom maps with server back-ups.
The solution, however, isn’t to continue to increase download sizes as time progresses.
Even though storage solutions have little problem in keeping up with the growing download sizes, there’s only so much that can be easily downloaded and uploaded by developers and users before it becomes a serious growing pain. The solution seems to lie somewhere in the world of streaming across servers on-demand, as users require the files. While separating various language packs can absolutely help, removing cut-scenes entirely (which can take up surprising space as Quantum Break showed us) and moving those to a streaming service ran by the developers or publishers would drastically help consumers fight what appears to be, for lack of a better term, bloating.
