Tonight’s was bad, but not as bad as a couple of weeks ago. Tonight’s only took about two hours.
But a couple of weeks ago I had an hour to kill. When I started the game launcher it said it was updating. About a 2.2 gig update. No problem, I have a fast connection and it should only take 10-15 minutes at most.
An hour later my free time was gone and it was still downloading. Downloads tab said it was going at not much higher than dial-up speed - seriously, less than 100 kilobits/second. So I just left it to do its thing and went back to the real world.
Checked a couple of hours later and it wasn’t even halfway done - 1.1 gigs out of 2.2. But now there was a system message telling me my Mac was low on disk space. But I had over 100 gigs free when I started. I opened a Finder window, and it said I only had about 20 gigs free.
Next morning I looked at it. A new system message said I was dangerously low on disk space. I had less than a gigabyte of free space and the Epic launcher said the download had failed. So I quit the launcher, and the free space immediately jumped back up to about 110 gigabytes. Later that day I started the launcher again. This time it said I was about 54% finished and I had downloaded 250 megs out of about 520 megs. That took about another 30 minutes, and my free space rapidly dropped to below 20 gigs again. As I watched my space drop, I though it would end up failing again, but just as it dropped to a little over 10 gigs free, the update finished. And my free space jumped up to about 110 gigs again.
That was extreme, but every time there’s an update it takes at least 2 hours and eats up 60-80 gigs of disk space temporarily.
Never had any such issues on the Switch, and I’m not seeing a lot of internet chatter about catastrophically bad updates on other platforms.
My WAG would be that most players not on consoles have relatively powerful “gaming” machines, so optimizing updates isn’t their top priority. And if you’re seeing such large download sizes every time I guess they download the whole game regardless of your status instead of bothering with assessing which specific files need updating for your particular installation.
But the thing is I’m not seeing large download sizes (well, maybe large by 10-15 year old standards.) The actual download is (or at least the launcher claims it is) a 2 Gigabyte or so patch.
And I certainly see internet chatter about slow downloads on other platforms. Like this one on an XBox forum from October. Note that 104 other people said they have the same question.
The download speed could be related to downloading just as a patch goes live and competing with everyone else. But the disk usage being 10-100 times the size of the file seems weird.