This is a bit of a tangential rant, so I apologize. But I recently tried to update Death Stranding, the flagship AAA game that Apple landed on macOS and in the App Store. The game itself is 77.5 GB; it had required a little over 150 GB to install. I shrugged that off at the time; they haven't figured out how to decompress on the fly, whatever.
I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes.
(I would "just blame the developer" here, but Apple clearly invested a lot into having this game available on macOS, in the App Store, and got Hideo Kojima to show up at WWDC (a full year ago, remember) and brag about how nice the entire experience is. Some of Apple's engineers probably worked directly on this port.)
It then sunk in that I didn't just need 75 GB of free space. I needed 150 GB. The App Store will completely download and completely decompress the entire game before replacing it. That is the patching process for the game. You need 231 GB free at all times on your machine to have and update a 77GB game.
This is completely insulting given Apple's storage prices, and the fact that the App Store does not let you install apps on an external drive.
Apple clearly doesn't get it. They act like they're nominally putting in the effort, but then it's still just completely half-assed even when things are played exactly like they want.
There's like, two guys at Apple who care about gaming. Everyone once in a while they manage to convince marketing to say something about it and rope in a couple more devs to half-assedly hammer out some tickets before they can go back to their normal tasking. There's no traction internally to taking PC gaming seriously at Apple.
Well, Apple employees don't actually live in Cupertino.
(I once went to a city council meeting where residents showed up and complained that new housing might allow Apple employees to live there and that they might be "too poor". Probably would be too.)
Clearly the App Store was never meant for distribution of 75 GB games, it's clearly meant for mostly <~1 GB packages.
I'm surprised they even allow huge apps like that in the first place, and don't have e.g. a 5 GB hard limit for usability reasons. They should have a limit if they're not going to support patch upgrades.
Who the heck has 231 GB free on their Mac internal SSD? Almost nobody. Why would the developer even distribute this via the App Store at all, for such a miniscule user base?
> I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes.
It is an unfortunate truth that one must now bear in mind, that games are for all intents and purposes enterprise software. They are as critical to profitability for the companies involved as enterprise software. They are large, distributed applications which are planned, budgeted, and staffed much like enterprise software. Accordingly, there is little to no concern for performance except when it's absolutely critical: the rendering pipeline and the netcode, for instance. For things like updates, where it would be easy to make some optimizations to reduce download size, those optimizations will not be taken. So you will redownload the entire game, including all of the uncompressed audio clips, every time someone changes a byte somewhere and it's shipped as an update.
It can be done, and Valve are old-school gamedev bros who clearly are interested in making it happen for games on their platform. But not every shop is like that, and in particular I wince when I contemplate updating a PS4 game...
This is a problem even for macOS updates, ever since they moved to the sealed system volume in macOS 11. When you update macOS, it downloads the entire OS and installs it to a separate APFS snapshot. The infuriating thing about this is that the sealed system volume should actually make it easier to provide reliable delta updates, but instead they used it as an excuse to remove them.
And of course Apple's always treated app updates as "download entire new copy of app to separate container and relaunch", ever since day one of the iOS App Store. This too could be handled with APFS snapshots.
I really wish Apple - and the rest of the industry - would stop being so damned allergic to delta updates. It's infuriating knowing how much damned engineering effort, say, Google put into shipping deltas on Chrome, and then everyone else is "just download two copies of every app while you're updating them, bandwidth and storage is free if we don't pay for them".
I am pretty sure App Store updates are smarter than that. For example Xcode delta installs have taken far less space (though they take a lot longer) if you grab them from the App Store.
I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes.
(I would "just blame the developer" here, but Apple clearly invested a lot into having this game available on macOS, in the App Store, and got Hideo Kojima to show up at WWDC (a full year ago, remember) and brag about how nice the entire experience is. Some of Apple's engineers probably worked directly on this port.)
It then sunk in that I didn't just need 75 GB of free space. I needed 150 GB. The App Store will completely download and completely decompress the entire game before replacing it. That is the patching process for the game. You need 231 GB free at all times on your machine to have and update a 77GB game.
This is completely insulting given Apple's storage prices, and the fact that the App Store does not let you install apps on an external drive.
Apple clearly doesn't get it. They act like they're nominally putting in the effort, but then it's still just completely half-assed even when things are played exactly like they want.