Sony To Reduce Day One Patch Size For Its Games
With the next generation of consoles, a new trend has been recently established by developers & publishers: the release of huge day one patches, whose purpose is to address bugs and various kinds of issues with newly published games.
While this isn’t quite an issue for some gamers, there’s an increasingly vocal anti-huge day one patch movement and perhaps righteously so, as there have been a few edge cases with really gigantic downloads - Grand Theft Auto V had a 1.14 GB patch, Evolve a 3GB patch, but the worst case had to be Halo: The Master Chief Collection with its 15GB patch. Truth to be told, this latter case happened because there was so much content in the collection that it couldn’t fit the 45GB Bluray.
Still, PlayStation gamers will be happy to know that, in an interview with Metro’s GameCentral, SCEE CEO Jim Ryan committed to “tightening up” day one patches at least for first party titles.
I think patching has a reasonable role to play, when it’s used to address bugs that are found at the last minute, right?
But as a surrogate, or a safety net, for a proper QA process I agree that things are maybe swinging too far in that direction. And certainly, as regards our own games, we’re gonna tighten up.
At the same time, Ryan pointed out that they can’t promise anything for third party games.
You’ve got to be clear minded about the responsibilities of the publisher and the responsibilities of the platform holder. This is not some sort of nanny state and I don’t think anybody would want that to be the case. And if publisher X chooses to go down a road of persistent, massive day one patches then ultimately publisher X will reap the consequences of that.
He also mentioned that doing otherwise may force some games to be delayed for several months, and that doesn’t necessarily sit well with many gamers, either.
There are many people who would be… who are quite happy to wait a small period of time while a patch downloads, rather than wait six months for the game to appear.
Where do you stand on this issue? Would you rather wait more for games releases or are you fine with the day one patch model? Let us know in the comments.