Everyone’s happily preloading Grand Theft Auto 6 onto their consoles before launch day, meanwhile I have to wait for my “physical” copy to arrive before I can get the download code. The sacrifice I had to make just for the trinket of a game box.
It’s crazily wondrous to realize that GTA 6 will be the biggest game of all time, and it is completely distributed digitally. All 210 gigabytes of the game - plus future patches and expansions - are delivered to customers via the Internet. It’s a testament to how far broadband has come. There’s enough bandwidth and speed to accommodate that much data at once, all without disturbing our regular social media scrolling services.
I’m old enough to remember when 250 gigabytes was the monthly data cap for the DSL service from AT&T. It seems unfathomable then that a single game can consume an entire month’s quota. Shoot, the entirety of Grand Theft Auto 3 fit onto a single DVD!
Which leads to the question: how much (or how little) are developers optimizing code for size? There’s no incentive to be efficient about it when the infrastructure can handle the data largess with relative ease. Have you seen the size of some of the latest iOS and macOS update releases? I get it, these days bandwidth is essentially unlimited, but 17 gigabytes for a dot macOS release is kind of insane.
Surely a genuine problem for A.I. to solve, no? Find efficiency in the code and compress the overall package as much as possible. Just because we can seed 210 gigabytes of a game multi-million times over on the same day, doesn’t mean we should.
Take me with you.