I am perfectly fine with paying developers, as I buy only the games i do like after some testing ) Going the repack route is unpredictable - no updates, may contain whatever viruses repacker is interested in adding (and given the particular one is likely Russian, I do have my reservations at this crazy time…), etc.
That is also a factor I do not understand. Bandwidth costs the storefront money, would Steam and others not want to decrease this load? And well done you with that fiber, you dog! I also have a fiber line but see no reason to upgrade from my tariff (150mib, i think?) that covers everything just to shave that hour of download time a year.
The console argument does actually make a lot of sense to me, thank you for the detailed response. It would still (seemingly) be possible to structure the project in a way that would allow replacing only what you actually need to replace, but that requires more investment in the architecture and likely cause more errors due to added complexity. Still, i cannot forgive the BG 3 coders for making me redownload these 120gb or so! )
Ok, that got me. I still remember the days of ZX and that funny noise… But I do have a question for one part of the meme: can someone explain to me why on Earth the updates now weigh these tens of gigs? I can accept that hires textures and other assets can take that space, but these are most likely not the bits that are being updated most of the time. Why don’t devs just take the code they actually update and send that our way?