why test something when they know us ignorant gamers will buy there garbage lol. it is ridiculous though 500mb plus updates and its like every week! smh. i cry at this gen. i miss PS2 days.

How does it feel to pay 59.99 and beta a game for a company? Not good eh...

puhhh so lets tell them to make only 499mb patches to stay credible!

It's worth remembering that most game/engine binaries will rarely weigh in at more than a few tens of MB, even with dynamic libraries. Most of the patch size will be asset changes and not code, and even then it may only be a small modification that unfortunately requires large amounts of unmodified data be re-downloaded.

Most game assets are compiled into binary formats optimized for use at run-time. On top of this the compiled assets will often be packaged into larger packages to further improve seek and overall load times, as well as to allow for direct loading-in-place to memory based on the compiled blob sizes and offsets to simplify the run-time resource management by the engine. The downside to this is if there's a problem with any asset in one of those larger packages, the entire package may have to be reconditioned dev-side and downloaded again player-side, even if it's for a few minor changes overall. Different devs handle resource packaging in different ways, but it is a very common occurrence and can vary across platforms.

The increase in patch sizes are an unfortunate yet often necessary side-effect that comes with the progression to 'next-gen', both due to h/w allowances and the change in asset and/or data quality and variation. There's not really an easy way out of this, short of getting everything perfect for release - easier said than done!

Even the largest of QA teams working for several years would be outdone for hours-of-playtime versus the first couple of hours played by the 2 million first week buyers of AC:U - without public alphas/betas everywhere it's just a hard thing to test, especially with open world designs.

NB. This isn't to excuse the AC:U mess up, though! Even if with testing and bug-fixes being an industry constant, these particular issues are so widespread that it seems fairly unlikely that it wasn't observed internally.

These massive patches are pretty disgusting. Just release a complete product or delay your game until it is a complete product.

I was offline from PSN for 2 days a couple of weeks ago and when I came back online I had over 4.5Gb of patches covering 3 or 4 games.

The Evil Within had a 4GB patch a few days ago. At least it stopped the game from crashing every 20 minutes. In fact, I don't remember the game crashing since the update (although I did encounter a bug that made me restart the game once).

WRONG. Sorry author but you are wrong. Games are far bigger and more complex than ever before so it's only natural that the patches get bigger as there is more to fixing something now.

I will stand by this statement :

I will not buy any games from Ubisoft until they release FINISHED GAMES ! Same goes for any other game publishers that continue to release unfinished games to meet a deadline like Microsoft did with the MasterChief Collection.

Current generation console gamers can stop this from happening by simply not buying these games.
Buy only FINISHED games or games that dont need 4 patches before it is a completely finished game and force both the game developers and publishers to release finished games that are actually GOLD not BETA GAMES that are half finished.

What about patches that give content for free ? Like FFXIV Patch is 2 GB and gave new raids class dungeon quests etc

Assassins's Creed Unity is going to be around 1tb by the time they fix it. I guess that I'm fortunate enough that I didn't have to pay for my Assassins Creed Xbone bundle.