On Thu, 13 Feb 2020 09:39:09 -0800, Ahmed Borno said:
The thread started with bandwidth surges and now power hogging is mentioned, I wonder what else might happen as a side effect to a small number of console/gaming companies not taking a direct responsibility in how they release large updates in a way that is not organized or scheduled but is rough and abrupt.
And I'd not expect it to improve - many of the game producers are leaving the "incremental patch" mode to a "just ship the current image of the whole damned thing", because for them it's cheaper to just push out a single updated image than try to build different images for upgrading from different current levels. After all - it's not like *they* are going to feel the pain of a single 106G upload, it's somebody else who feels the pain of 5 million downloads of a 106G image refresh. Economists call this sort of thing an "externality".