Agree that the original numbers were on the low side, but are you sure your ones aren't on the high side? I know it's different to TV streaming, but to stream 4k HDR from Amazon or Netflix, they usually recommend 35-50 mbps; I know that's not at 60fps (most of the time), but additional frames are linear in terms of bandwidth requirement. So, if the stream is at say 30fps, I'd estimate max 75-100mbps for a 60fps 4k stream.

Obviously, the TV stream will use compression algorithms - is that what's driving your estimate up as I'm assuming these services don't use the workarounds to the same extent?

Having said that, I'd still rather run the hardware locally.

Sounds like this would be equivalent to having the base game contain just the intro, but there would be plenty of free "DLC", released with the base game, that would contain the rest. (Also, you could have things like a high resolution texture pack "DLC", which would be optional to explore the game, but might be good for those willing to sacrifice excessive amounts of disk space for graphics.)

PS4 does this. It installs a "minimum to play" then keeps installing in the background while you play.

The Guild Wars MMO client was DECADES ahead with how efficient it was with downloading and installing. Its initial install was very light, and it downloaded files for areas as you approached them. (Of course, being an MMO, you expected to be online).

Gaming *absolutely* does need to go down this direction. Games have gotten huge. Excising languages to separate installs is an easy first place to do it that some games do. I don't want different installs for languages, but "language packs". Text files for those translations are small, but localized audio files, textures, and (especially) pre-rendered content is huge. Some games already do this (many console jRPGs have a "free Japanese language pack" you can get to restore the original voices if you don't like your localized ones).

The next obvious place to go is textures: Some games already come with "sold separately for free" high-res texture packs. This should be standard as gaming moves beyond 1080 for some and sticks to 1080 for others. Simulacra 2 (an FMV point/click adventure game) was produced at 4K. I don't do 4K, so I have a big chunk of extra space from my install there. A lot of the huge size of games lately is from this. It's harder to implement (which is why I didn't suggest it first), but it's the place where we're likely to see the best benefit.

In the 90s and 00s "warez" scene, there were some packers that made efficient small packs of games (since Internet speeds were much, much slower). They'd reprocess videos to lower resolution, or strip the soundtrack, etc, for small, efficient downloads.

And, last but not least, there were/are games sold in chapters [including the shareware model]. They get distributed in different ways, but some of them do update to add a new chapter each as a pack that installs separately.

GOG fails miserably at this for its extras: While games let you specify language to download, you a lot of "Extras" content isn't labeled/filtered for language. I ran into this while using gogrepo -- Not only is The Witcher 3 in my library as two separate downloads for some reason, each of them have huge multi-lingual extras that don't get filtered out when I specify English.

I am on 56 out of 63 GB rn. My Internet has slowed down to a steady 0,5 MB/s for some reason. It's 7.30 p.m. here... here's hoping i can finish the download before midnight and play the damn game. The worst thing is the knowledge that a lot of things i need to download i am never going to use, like 4k textures.

At least i will have a story to tell my children and grandchildren about the times when the Internet speed was 1 MB/s

So as I thought, it's the compression algorithms.

Personally, I think the 4k streams look slightly better than a standard blu-ray, although depends on the upscaling your TV uses and what bit-rate Amazon/Netflix are using in the area (it was better before they did the cost cutting exercise - sorry, I mean "protecting the internet during a pandemic" of dropping the bit rate earlier this year). I do agree that a 4K Blu Ray with Dolbyvision looks significantly better than a stream though.

Anyway - sorry, I dragged this off topic.

Back on topic, I still think that OP's suggestion only works if you have a complex launcher system and it's too costly/too much effort.

Free Download Manager 5 with a browser plug-in generally works pretty good for me with GOG, with a reasonably reliable resume and queuing. You need to add each link manually though.

I have it setup to intersect a link click when I hold the ALT key down.

You can also set the download speed.