I had time to play some video games today. So I opened Sea of Thieves. After taking a fucking ETERNITY downloading all the latest update data at 40% of my actual network speed, it finally runs. It then crashes due to some bogus error. I run it again AND IT HAS TO REVERIFY ALL 113GB OF THE INSTALLED FILES ALL OVER AGAIN AT NETWORK SPEEDS.
How the fuck do people who live in cities and places with bandwidth caps deal with this" “Oh shit I gotta pay $30 in bandwidth overages because my game crashed and it has to verify again”. WTF? Imagine having to wait en entire month for your bandwidth limit to rollover so you can try launching a game again to see if it still crashes. I’ve blown through 400gb of bandwidth in the past 2 days just trying to find a game in my library I can play that doesn’t do this as badly.
This problem is not limited to sea of thieves. Skyrim is a fun game. I never get to play it because steam has to reverify the entire install every other fucking time I open steam.
All i’m saying is that the absurd install size of modern games along with the constant forced updates makes everything too much of a pain in the ass to be worth dealing with. I guess moving forward only GOG games are still viable in the era of enshittification.
Why can’t steam just give us the ability to circumvent verifications… fuck.
If you’re having to re-verify the integrity of your game, I’d be concerned about your storage device. Re-verifying also doesn’t mean redownloading unless it needs to retrieve new files to replace ones that are missing or corrupt. Updates are annoyingly common as well, and I’d agree that it would be very nice to be able to just say “nah, I’m good” when it’s a single player experience. Unfortunately Valve seems to have waived that feature, instead opting to let developers choose how those updates are made available.
I definitely sympathize with those who have data caps. Those are effectively dead and gone in my part of the world, but I can’t imagine trying to traverse today’s triple-A gaming landscape otherwise.
Seconding the re-verification thing. Sounds indeed like that storage device is getting senile. Never had any game self verify in any launcher I‘ve used. Might also explain the errors in game.
I had to do it constantly when I would install Xbox Gamepass for PC games. Look at those funny and they’d decide to stop working randomly.
Yet another reason why I refuse to buy new games. With all this kind of BS, it’s not worth my time.
I just bought yet another retro handheld. (Anbernic Cube XX. ) I started down the retro path a couple of years ago because as you said, modern game updates make a quick play impossible.