Tell me if this sounds familiar: you buy a new release and eagerly run home so that you can start up the game and dive into the experience right away… only to find out that a massive day one patch is further pushing out your game time. It’s a scenario that most of us have dealt with at one point or another. The recent launch of Evolve presented players with a 3GB patch before they were able to join the hunt.
Fortunately, someone is listening to the outcry of those who are against this growing trend of massive updates at launch. That someone is Sony. In an interview with Metro, SCEE CEO Jim Ryan acknowledged the rising issue of hefty day one patches. He even took it a step further than simply agreeing that the issue exists, he claimed that Sony plans to “tighten up” the process with their first party titles. The same could not be promised regarding third party titles, but it’s a start.
We don’t know exactly what this means, but it could result in developers having a size limit when submitting patches in the future. This, in turn, might lead to longer development times, but at least we’d see a noticeable decrease in broken games on release. It will be interesting to see if Sony keeps this promise or if it will end up on the backburner like Driveclub PS Plus Edition.
