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[SomTervo]

Slow for some, likely due to location. It is not slow for everyone.

And how Xbox games don't install from disk, but rather download entire game from internet during the "disk install" is a much greater offense, IMO...

There's definitely something about Ps4 firmware that messes with speeds. I got really high speeds for about two years then after the most recent update it went from about 1.5MB/s to 0.01MB/s.

All other devices in the house performing normally around 1-2 per sec.

PS not saying it's like that for everyone

 

[KingV]

I should point out that they do compress their content, to varying degrees.

I should also point out that heavy compression either eats into quality or into cpu cycles. The lossless compression way either eats into game performance at runtime or into decompression time before the game starts.

I think it makes perfect sense to heavily compress on the disc or the download but decompress on the HDD. I would think they would already do this since it seems so obvious though.

 

[User123456]

Completely agree with everything Jim says. Been a console gamer for 23 years and a PC gamer for maybe 15, I have tried my hardest to enjoy the current gen but only the Wii U survived against my PC.

 

[IdreamofHIME]

The best part of all this shit is how much people pay for PSN+ and Live.

What do either of those have to do with installing games?

 

[Majine]

It's hard not to go full PC when consoles are becoming more like PCs but still don't offer the benefits and flexibility of an open platform. The 1st party offerings from both consoles don't excite me like they used to either.

 

[DarkConfidant]

I didn't know this problem existed. My games all download and install pretty quickly on PS4, Vita, and 3DS.
It's like I'm reading about another planet.

 

[Askherserenity]

What do either of those have to do with installing games?

Nothing? But it has a whole lot to do with download speeds and just the overall service.

 

[family_guy]

2 things:

1) PC gaming isn't as inconvenient as the masses thinks it is.
2) The convenience factor of the platforms is slowly congealing into one huge mess. It's not quite there yet, but the difference is shrinking every year.

Well there's also the convenience of having a unified, consistent experience. With PC, you've got multiple PC clients you might have to deal with like Microsoft Store, UPlay, Origin, and Steam, all with their own friends lists and each with their own interface quirks. You have PC games that don't launch in the same way. Some take you directly into the game, the others launch the config utility every time you click play. Then you have differences in how games get patched depending on what client you're using. You also have graphics card drivers that typically should be updated when a new AAA game comes out. Then there's the performance configurations and confusion in the PC game performance thread when people with mostly identical setups can't run the same games at the same level of performance. PC gaming is great when everything falls into place correctly, but many people don't want to invest time to address issues when it doesn't go well. At least there's Steam refunds though.

 

[Vena]

Because Nintendo doesn't make games with hours of voice acting, high quality models and textures, or massive open worlds.

You could play this (in an ugly fashion) straight off of the disc. They even allowed free download of the higher res assets ahead of time, didn't even need to pre-order digitally. The assets downloaded were high quality even if the human models were terrifying.

 

[Huge Succeeded]

'It's obviously no secret that PC is better than consoles when it comes to all aspects of gaming, the only edge that consoles really had were cost and convenience.'

Jesus, I'm a big PC/Console gamer but he has really gone off the deep end with that statement.

has he though

I mean there's other reasons to own consoles, sure, but I'm not too sure I'd disagree with that statement even despite that it sounds like it was meant to be hyperbolic.

 

[Zemm]

Good video topic. "Plug & play" died with this gen

Even the PS3 was terrible for it, lol GT5 and MGS4.

 

[Huge Succeeded]

2 things:

1) PC gaming isn't as inconvenient as the masses thinks it is.
2) The convenience factor of the platforms is slowly congealing into one huge mess. It's not quite there yet, but the difference is shrinking every year.

*at it's worst* is an important factor to his post that you seem to have ignored. I am a staunch defender of PC gaming and it's where I play all of my games that don't have Nintendo logos on the box. but as weird and inconvenient as console gaming has been becoming relative to how things used to be in the console space, MCC is the only shit I've ever played on a console that came close to aggravating me as much as the (often arcane and esoteric) issues that I sporadically have with PC games.

 

[Kinyou]

There's definitely something about Ps4 firmware that messes with speeds. I got really high speeds for about two years then after the most recent update it went from about 1.5MB/s to 0.01MB/s.

All other devices in the house performing normally around 1-2 per sec.

PS not saying it's like that for everyone

Have you tried switching your DNS address? For some reason did my PS4 really dislike the Google DNS. As soon as I changed it my speed went up again.

 

[Starwolf_UK]

Didn't people sometimes find with PS4 download speed all sorts of "one weird trick that Sony hates" solutions like DNS settings, port forwarding/DMZ?

But that still leaves the whole point of having to download at all if you're aimed at being plug and play.

One thing the 3DS does that every other console should copy is that patches are separate downloads in the eShop. So if you're buying a physical copy, you can tell the 3DS to pre-download the patch and it'll apply as soon as you insert the cart. And, of course, download versions are already fully patched.

Essentially, when Nintendo is schooling you on online, you're doing it wrong!

Nintendo also learns from itself in some ways as well . On the Wii U there is no way to download patches, you insert a disc start playing a game and it might decide to download then (stopping you from playing the game until it is done). If it doesn't it might do so when you put it into standby mode. If you're buying a digital game and there are patches, thankfully, those get added to the download queue automatically.

It still baffles me how different the Wii U OS to the 3DS one (another difference between the two is the syntax of checking space for download games and checking you have funds to buy it).

I believe in the past the 3DS would let you play games even if you were missing updates but due to tighting security (after the horse has bolted) I don't think that is possible now. 3DS download speeds were limited to basically save battery life (faster downloads was a New 3DS feature) but when you're getting less than 4 gigs at most (usually much less than 1) it's not a big issue compared to 50GBs of uncompressed Vogon audio (I know that's a bit of a straw man, I'm just thinking of FFXIII and Titanfall essentially)...in the English version of the game.

 

[jelly]

Are Day One patches always a result of a rush ?

I'm not sure if compression would help fit a game on one Blu-Ray if the content is 60+GB?

Correct me if I'm wrong though.

 

[finley83]

This is largely why ive stayed away from the current gen consoles. I already have a decent gaming PC and the appeal of a console is simplicity - i just want to buy a game, stick it in and play it instantly.

Last gen was fine as patches were small enough not to matter - have to say that the Mafia 3 and DOOM examples here sound ridiculous though!

 

[Lanrutcon]

*at it's worst* is an important factor to his post that you seem to have ignored. I am a staunch defender of PC gaming and it's where I play all of my games that don't have Nintendo logos on the box. but as weird and inconvenient as console gaming has been becoming relative to how things used to be in the console space, MCC is the only shit I've ever played on a console that came close to aggravating me as much as the (often arcane and esoteric) issues that I sporadically have with PC games.

And I never disagreed with you. I'm saying that things are getting worse: right now consoles have the convenience edge but if things are doing downhill and soon* console owners will have an experience far close to that of a PC user than the one they got used to.

 

[brokenbeans]

I'm dreading the thought of downloading COD Legacy Edition I have a 200mb connection but that ain't worth a shit when MS only me download between 10 and 40mbs 😔

 

[Shai-Tan]

My main issue is just how slow PSN is. It's the only service that can't download for me at my cable modem speed of 100mbps and it's often so slow it's like 800 K/s sometimes (and it's wired). It wouldn't matter if I could download 20gb patches at 10MB/s instead of sitting there all evening. I recently bought some old games in anticipation of getting a ps4 pro and just letting it patch up games meant I had to wait hours each time or do a bunch of upfront housekeeping then let it patch games over 24 hours.

 

[jelly]

One thing that bothers me the most about how games on digital distribution is how they can't seem to be able to just have you download a cumulative of the latest patched version. Instead, it always downloads the full original 1.0 version, and then downloads the latest patch separately, which sometimes replaces gigs worth of content.

How hard would it be for them to do this process on their end, and just have me download the "updated" version of the game?

Is that really true?

That's ridiculous. Steam doesn't, that's for sure.

 

[Irminsul]

People are whining when it's their own lack of preparation causing the problem more often than not.

Nothing says "convenience" like the possibility of having a "lack of preparation".

Is that really true?

That's ridiculous. Steam doesn't, that's for sure.

Funnily enough, Wii U and 3DS games are also fully patched if you download them.

 

[FyreWulff]

Nintendo also learns from itself in some ways as well . On the Wii U there is no way to download patches, you insert a disc start playing a game and it might decide to download then (stopping you from playing the game until it is done).

Not sure what's up with your Wii U, but the one I had, had the option to play immediately while the patch background downloaded or wait for it to finish.

One thing that bothers me the most about how games on digital distribution is how they can't seem to be able to just have you download a cumulative of the latest patched version. Instead, it always downloads the full original 1.0 version, and then downloads the latest patch separately, which sometimes replaces gigs worth of content.

How hard would it be for them to do this process on their end, and just have me download the "updated" version of the game?

Yeah, this is really annoying. 360 also did this shit too, they never baked the latest patch into the digital downloads.

It's also stupid that it's 2016 and Steam doesn't do delta patching. If a dev wants delta patching they have to write a whole stack themselves.

 

[jelly]

Jim's on point as usual

The fact that Sony and Microsoft even charge for their crappy network is even more ridiculous

You get what you pay for 🤔

 

[thenexus6]

Yeah its the worst thing about this gen,

I can download a 25GB game from Steam in 10 minutes, but it ages hours to download a 8GB game on PSN. Awesome.

 

[AcademicSaucer]

I sold my PS4 with the intention of buying a Neo, but in the meantime I spent more and more time with my PC and I really don't see the point of buying a console for a few exclusives, thanks to the play anywhere thing I'm even playing Forza horizon 3, not having to pay for the online is great too.

 

[Chairmanchuck]

Actually Konami fucked up (a bit).

They were at the German boardgame convention, I saw a big KONAMI logo hovering over everything. if you arrive its just a YuGiOh-tournament.

 

[synce]

He hit the nail on the head. This is the first console gen where I'm mostly just standing on the side, looking at people and asking why. For me to buy a PS4 game it better be exclusive and damn good, or exclusive and dirt cheap.

 

[FyreWulff]

Why can't publishers compress their games like Nintendo does?

It's ridiculous that games are just dumped onto the disc like that

There is compression

However, what nobody bothers with anymore on PS4 and One is optimizing the data on-disc. IE, putting common data on the faster parts of the disc, or putting it in places in linear games to avoid the laser having to seek as much as possible, because now the entire disc gets ripped to the HDD anyway and the OS can put your bits fuck all anywhere due to how HDDs work (yes, there are/were utilities for optimizing the actual physical location of your data on discs on previous consoles)

And somewhat frustratingly, apparently almost no option exists to use multiple discs to install a game.

 

[Pop-O-Matic]

Actually Konami fucked up (a bit).

They were at the German boardgame convention, I saw a big KONAMI logo hovering over everything. if you arrive its just a YuGiOh-tournament.

Yu-Gi-Oh! is Konami's main tabletop gaming IP so that isn't surprising.

 

[Elandyll]

Can't say I have had the same experience as Jim so far, being myself a PS4 and PC gamer as well.

I have to wait on either systems to install a game (and if it is a very large game, yes it can also take hours on my PC), and even if it takes say double the time on the PS4 (made up number), it's not like I'll just stare at the screen during the install, whether for 2 hours or 4 hours.

Now this being said, with one kind of platform we still have access to physical releases and used/ shared games, and in the case of the PS4 PlayNow has been downright amazing for me, borderline sorcery.

So I'm not sure if I've been lucky and Jim unlucky in our game picks... But his rant definitely sounded a bit extreme and even borderline "unhinged" to me at times.

Is there work to do on their Network for console platform owners? Certainly.
Is Mafia 3 and the situation Jim encountered the norm? Not in my experience. Not even close.

 

[Servbot24]

And that has anything to do with Sony and MS touting their 'Play Now' functionality?

It's 'Play Now' not 'Play Now if you spend a day preloading it the day before'

Did anyone seriously take that as "If you buy our console you will suddenly have infinitely fast download speeds"? Of course not. That's a bizarre expectation to hold.

 

[Chairmanchuck]

Yu-Gi-Oh! is Konami's main tabletop gaming IP so that isn't surprising.

Yeah. It wasnt. The funny thing would have been if there was a MGS tabletop game or so, but it was just YuGiOh.

Is Mafia 3 and the situation Jim encountered the norm? Not in my experience. Not even close.

The slow af downloadspeeds on PS4 and Xbox One arent a secret.

 

[Gai Murakumo]

I'm dreading the thought of downloading COD Legacy Edition I have a 200mb connection but that ain't worth a shit when MS only me download between 10 and 40mbs 😔

Same here my Xbox One for some reason always puts me at max 15 Mb/s when downloading something even though I have a way better connection. There are sometimes it randomly tanks to really low download speeds every so often, which makes no sense. I'm going physical with COD but I know I still have to download quite a bit so that sucks.

 

[Mithos]

But PSN speeds are SLOW, which is a shame, considering it's a paid service.

Yeah it's really slow for me compared to PC download-speeds.

PC speed: ~4GB/hrs
PSN speed: ~1GB/hrs

 

[TheAngryMonkey]

http://www.twitch.tv/easyallies/v/94254908
Modern console experience.

Guy didn't install/update stuff and is getting over 200Mb/s on the Gears install. That seems pretty damn good to me.

 

[xrnzaaas]

Yep, plug & play is long gone. I remember when my relatives were visiting me not long ago and their daughter asked me if she could play Tearaway on my PS4 (how the hell she even knows what that is ;p). I have a disc version, but by the time the update was finishing downloading they were already on their way. :/ (I know about the early launch feature, just shown her Ratcher&Clank instead)

Oh, and I have another rant about Xbox One. Why the hell isn't it automatically downloading updates when you log in to the system? I found myself having to wait when a game has informed me about an update as I was trying to launch it.

 

[Jorok Goldblade]

But they don't consider themselves in competition with the PC market.

Will watch later but that's a filmsy premise.

I could say that I don't consider myself bound by the laws of gravity, but that won't stop me from crumbling into a pile of broken bones and mushed organs if I jump off my roof.

 

[RedSwirl]

Not totally sure I agree with everything there. After getting a PS4 I pretty quickly figured out how to mitigate these problems and make the process of getting to the game smoother:

1) The PS4 seems to download faster in rest mode. I can't 100% confirm it but that seems to be the case.

2) I initiate PSN downloads from the mobile app or a browser on a computer whenever I can, which is more often than I'm using the console. The interfaces of both are smoother than on the console. I basically don't ever visit the PlayStation Store from the console itself.

3) When I get a new disc, I just immediately slide it into the PS4 and let it sit there. I don't wait until I'm ready to play the game.

Every game needs to be The Witcher, guys.

Edit: I apologise. That was rude of me. I'm having a rough day.

Funny you'd say that. The Witcher 3 without any of the expansion packs is only 20GB. Fallout 4's base game is also only about 20GB. Mankind Divided unpacked is 56GB on PC, but the download is 20.

The main thing I agree with Jim on is download sizes. I think developers need to take more care to compress their stuff, but most just seem to go right up to the size limit of whatever physical medium they're using on consoles, and on PC they're already going way beyond that. There are groups that release cracked PC games that have been further compressed so they don't take as long to download, sometimes they aren't even half the original size.

Bethesda talked about how modular its asset pipeline is -- how they break up their art assets into small pieces so they can combine them to create new ones instead of doing new art from scratch, which saves space data-wise. I get the feeling Witcher 3 did the same thing when I look at things like structures and NPCs.

 

[kruis]

I'm surprised Jim Sterling didn't understand why PS4/Xbox One games are now installed to hard drive by default. And that's because loading data from disc is just too slow on a modern console with a lot of RAM. Both current gen consoles have 8GB of memory, 16 times more than the previous gen. If a PS4 drive has a disk speed of 100MB per second, it would still take 80 seconds to fill up the whole 8 GB of RAM.

http://ps4daily.com/2013/03/playstation-4-blu-ray-drives-spins-3-times-faster-than-ps3/

Technically, the PlayStation 4 Blu-ray speed is rated at 6x, for maximum read speed of 27 MBs per second. That's a big step up from the PS3, which only had a 2x speed that maxed out at 9 MB/s.

So the Blu-Ray player in the PS4 maxes out at 27 MB/s. To fill up the entire 8 GB of RAM, it would take almost 5 minutes. And that's a best case scenario.

 

[StoppedInTracks]

I didn't update my games on Xbox for a while. Good lord. I had to download like a full 50GB game worth of updates just to get to the start menus.

This is the worst. At least on PS3 I could just cancel the update and play the game in old version, Xbone offers me only: Download Update or CANCEL. What the hell. I don't want your stupid 40 GB patch, I want to play the damn game singleplayer!

 

[Polk]

Slow for some, likely due to location. It is not slow for everyone.

And how Xbox games don't install from disk, but rather download entire game from internet during the "disk install" is a much greater offense, IMO...

If only PSN doesn't saturate my bandwidth while XBL and Steam do, it's not problem on my end but with their CDNs.

And I thought Xbox games don't download entire game from net but rather download patches during instalation therefore such shitty message on screen.

 

[R_thanatos]

Some games do use the "play now" promise and did good things with it.

The division did it well and driveclub was quite well done too on that aspect.

 

[cheesekao]

Yep, plug & play is long gone. I remember when my relatives were visiting me not long ago and their daughter asked me if she could play Tearaway on my PS4 (how the hell she even knows what that is ;p). I have a disc version, but by the time the update was finishing downloading they were already on their way. :/ (I know about the early launch feature, just shown her Ratcher&Clank instead)

You could have just played the game while the update ran in the background you know. I see no reason to wait for the patch to finish unless it fixes something gamebreaking.

 

[Dyson Industries]

I see them more of an admittance that both companies put out sorry ass hardware at the start of the gen, but you've got a point for sure.

One company did, that much is certain.

 

[Armaros]

Did anyone seriously take that as "If you buy our console you will suddenly have infinitely fast download speeds"? Of course not. That's a bizarre expectation to hold.

Good job on arguing against a strawman. Who said anything about infinitely fast download speeds?
We are talking about Play Now for many games is not Play Now. And your advocating preloading to deal with that functionality not working as advertised isn't a real defense or solution.

 

[Mael]

I guess that's the reason I don't really play on ps4 much.
I have to clean the fridge anytime I want to play something new anyway.
Might as well play on pc or boot up my old wii if I want to be bothered about applications taking too much space (and with the current state of hdd on pcs I don't think I'll ever be bothered by that either).

 

[Beer Monkey]

This is why I've been shifting back to PC as my primary gaming platform, probably permanently. The things I like the most about consoles are slowly fading away.

 

[Peltz]

Because that would require effort, which is something that AAA companies don't have time for when they're releasing 6 games a year

Oh this again. "Lazy devs" complaints sound totally ignorant.

 

[Vic_Viper]

after watching the video I just remembered how I tried to play Dishonored DE on PS4 and had the exact same problem. It downloaded like 8 gigs and said it was ready to play, went in and played the tutorial and reached a door to leave and was told I still had to download 30 gigs before being able to continue. However at Song thought this was a clever idea was just wrong. Atleast inform the player what is happening.

 

[Norse]

On xbone, your quickest install speeds are if you....

Insert new game
When Xbox says there is an update select "no"
Install off disc
When installed start game
When Xbox says there is an update select "yes"
When update completes...enjoy


No need to go offline when installing games. Just do as listed above.