


Technically, physical retail is still an option, but digital game sales on PC surpassed physical years ago. Watch Dogs needs 25GB of HDD space but only a 13GB download. Most notable is Titanfall with a 21GB initial download that unpacks to 48GB. Official downloads with heavy compression aren’t unheard of though. The assets in repacks, however, aren’t always completely lossless compared to the official version. Battlefield 4 is a 25GB download from Origin, but there are repacks sitting at 17GB. Wolfenstein: The New Order on Steam requires a 40GB download, but there are repacks available that are only 15GB.

Some repacks have audio support stripped down to one language. A popular trend among pirate sites is offering “repacks”-versions of games where they’ve compressed textures, audio, and videos to drastically reduce the initial download size before decompressing with special installers. Repacks and store racksĮven pirates are concerned with download size, some perhaps turning toward it for relief from oversized games. For a lot of people, installing games from a backup hard drive or physical discs is still faster than downloading them. People in low bandwidth situations will likely only want to have to download a 35GB game once. One area where Origin and UPlay still falter, however, is the lack of a backup utility like Steam’s. When a Steam Free Weekend starts some people may have to use six or 12 hours of that weekend just downloading the game, but Origin Game Time doesn’t start the clock until after the first boot.
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Origin, on the other hand, separately displays the download size and install size.įurther evidence EA takes customers’ bandwidth into consideration is how it runs Origin Game Time. Before starting a download Steam and UPlay only display the required HDD space, the former accounting for Valve’s new installation process which can inflate the HDD requirement compared to the initial download. Gathering this data actually revealed stark differences between how the different download clients convey this information to users.
