as a follow up to the question I asked before about game patches, are game patches once applied actually the size the download says it is (specifically on console)? I play elder scrolls online and a lot of those patches can vary from 60-80gb on the download. is each patch actually eating up that much MORE of my hard drive on my console? if that's the case how do consoles or pc's avoid ending up in a situation where one game ends up consuming all of your hard drive space? and for that matter why do so many console patches tell you that you need so much more space for the download than you actually end up needing?
There are two answers to this - the short term and long term issues with install size.
The short term answer is that we generally only need the hard drive space for a single patch temporarily - once the patch is applied and your game is up to date we can safely delete the patch since its purpose is fulfilled and it is no longer needed. If the patch contains replacement assets, the patch can delete the old assets and replace them with the new. However, many patches add new content - new assets, new environments, new textures, and so on - and they do so permanently. While this won’t necessarily be the same size as the entire patch, they will take up additional hard drive space. This leads us to the long term issues.
As live games mature and new content gets added to them, their installed size tends to increase in order to support all of the permanent post-launch content in addition to the launch content. This can cause a mature game to take up an much larger amount of hard drive space than when they started. Higher end mobile games (e.g. Genshin Impact) are especially susceptible to this problem due to the increased processing capability of mobile devices outpacing their relatively small storage capacities. Most mobile games in this situation will selectively delete old/unused assets to save space and then re-download them on demand if the player decides to engage with that content. It's also one reason why mobile games have so much seasonal content - once the season is over, most of the assets can be deleted in order to make room for the next.
Bungie actually had to deal with this very problem for Destiny 2 - their old expansion content took up many gigabytes of hard drive space but the vast majority of players (~99.7%) didn't regularly play that old content. They took the mobile game solution - they created the "Destiny Vault", where they would "retire" old and unused expansion content on a regular basis in order to keep the game's install size manageable for current players. Then, as the case warranted, they could periodically bring back popular old expansion content (and even update/retune it for modern gameplay paradigms) and still keep room for new content.
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