It downloads everything because there are no existing manifest/files present on your computer. This is the reason why downloading speed isn’t a problem when you are installing a game from scratch. Therefore, you spend a lot of time waiting for these copies to happen you are bound by the copying speed. It would make 20MB downloadable files and 10220 MB of copying. Multiply this by ten (there are ten files in total).
When Steam is building these files, it would have to download the 2MB files and copy the remaining 1022 MB from your existing installation per file. Their total size is a gigabyte each and in them, you have to change 2MB of files.
So what does all this have to do with the low download speed? Well, let’s suppose you have ten large files. What is happening if everything is in order and my download speed is still low?
It calculates which files it needs to download, copy over or replace. It calculates which files are modified and allocates space for them.
Now, when Steam gets to know that there is an update available for any of your games, it compares the new manifest against that which is already present on your computer. If it is something entirely new, it divides them into new chunks. When any update is released, Steam analyzes the update and calculates how it can make the files out of chunks that are already saved in its database.
For each game available, there is a manifest available which tells how to assemble these chunks into the game files. i have such evolving taste i rather keep getting new then holding on to old.Every game present on Steam is broken down into chunks of around 1MB in size. love the no storage issue in my home but im also a person that prefers paying for music streaming services then buying music. If the unthinkable happens and somehow EA collapses which in my book would probably mean another serious world economy problem and then i think we all would have bigger issues to consider but just for the sake of argument EA out of the air vanishes, i dont think their assets will.Īnd i just love digital its far greener no boxes no plastic no shipping.
they are just temp licenses.įrom that experience i learned if i want to keep something forever i need to create a back up but ill be honest i read all the books before i lost my license and its rare for me to want to reread something and im not the type of gamer that will want to play years from now old series of sims. So i could still read the books i had loaded on my device but i no longer had an acct to DL the books i bought, in short my license to the books were considered over- this happened i think as well with earlier music DLs.
This ends my rant but feel free to debate, discuss this digital issue.īack when ebooks were new i started buying books from a small epublisher bought tons of books at really low prices and they even had a point systems so i got even many for free and then the small publisher was bought by barnes and nobles and though my acct was transferred over i lost access to many of my titles and then barnes and nobles sold the division to amazon and i was locked out of the acct completely. and when I need to, I can reinstall a game or content from that. So I could keep the gigs upon gigs of game data on that. there is a company out there that I won't name that has a 5TB external drive (Terra Byte = 1024GB for the uninformed) for only $150 right now. But how about an option to download the entire game as an an image file we can burn to dvd/blue-ray/cd or mount on our computers as a back up resource. Now I prefer physical copies, and go for the digital content if there is no other option. if the game provider goes out of business you can still play and reinstall the game years down the road (provided you still have the disks) it would take work finding all the patches if any now adays, but you'd still have the base game and any expansions.
but it's the most reliable source for content. Physical copies yes break down, the CD/DVD/blu-ray cracks and breaks. Digital downloading has a big flaw in it that could erupt whenever a digital content provider goes down. and copying the directories may not be enough due to registry entries/errors or file corruption, files elsewhere on a computer. or if EA says, you have 30 days to get all the content and then we go poof! What happens then? we don't have a physical copy to re-install the software. But what about the problems with Digital downloads? the company goes under oops their goes any chance of re-downloading the game from their servers. Ok, I know digital downloads are getting bigger and bigger and lots of other companies are doing digital only sales.