Because the other option is 30-60GB patch

There are huge (1-15Gig) .archive files that have all the geometry and texture data.

The patches splice data into those files

To do that you copy its contents into a temp file, merging the additional info as you go.

But this means for each archive file updated, there will be 2 copies of these huge files (plus initial patch file) and every pair needs to be kept until all files have been updated (otherwise you can't roll back and would require a full download to fix)

I get its annoying keeping a spare 100G free, specially on a smaller SSD, but that the tech.

Maybe having an option to choose a secondary drive for holding the temp files would be nice

~100 GB free space isn't by any means a steep requirement. Especially for a game that has fairly demanding system requirements. Having a tiny amount of free disk space is just a bad idea in general, in particular for an SSD. The only ludicrous thing here is your complaint.

I don't see why, I always fill up my SSD's. Never caused a problem. And yes, having to basically have a whole HD for one game (that isn't such steep on the requirements, I'm running this thing fine with a GTX 1660) is one of the silliest things I can think of.

Then you're leaving SSD performance on the table. SSDs slow down as they approach capacity - as a rule of thumb, you should leave c30% of your drive empty during normal usage to maintain peak performance.

Of course, if you continue to get annoyed with the patching process, just do what I do and wait for a game to be "complete" before purchasing it - as an added benefit, you don't pay anything near full retail price and all bug fixes that are going to be issued have already been issued.

I agree this is an issue.. It takes 10min to download 12Gb, but the applying patches has been taking 2h so far and still at 53%. And its making my pc useless for anything else while downloading doesnt influence the performance.

At that point, one can wonder if redownloading the whole game wouldn’t be a better option. While it wouldn’t solve @tomviana’s problem, it could be a good idea to have a do it at your own risk checkbox that would permit patching without keeping old files. Are you serious ? Considering that SSDs are much more expensive than old HDDs, that 30% requirement is just ridiculous. I generally tend to keep it at 10%, but 30% is going insane. As a rule of wallet, I can’t follow this.

When running out of storage space, it seems a bit pointless complaining about the size of the games you purchase, when that will not change the fact, but getting more storage space, will...

I don’t get your logic. Being out of storage space depends on the game size ; if I can spare 10GB and want to install Tetris, I won’t feel out of space, while in the case of CP2077 it’s obviously another matter.

But anyway, OP does have enough space to run CP2077, the only problem being the updates that require a 100% increase of the game storage space requirement.

I'm sure better patching or written so it can make a pseudo file with offset information and then doing a copy would be better. But somehow i don't see them doing that. The most space free you'd need is the largest individual file it needs to patch, plus say 100Mb to be safe.

Not necessarily. Imagine a compressed file into which all occurences of a word should be replaced by another : uncompress, replace, recompress. Doing an offset-based change would work, but possibly at the expense of a much bigger patch, maybe even making preferable to just re-download the game again.

You do find patches that bring the full archive file with all data, that needs to be replaced very often these days.
I think it was Call of Duty where everybody did complain about patches with 70GB or more.

You can even find such games on GoG.
The most WTF update was one for Tropico 6, with a patch of 23,3GB, while the installer is 10GB (yeah, you read right).

CDPR and several others got a love for delta patches (and I like them too), where only changes brought with the patch.
Sometimes those patches will bring full assets, that will be replaced, but you need to open and decompress the asset file and reverse this then.
Sometimes they will just change some line of code in a file.

These days download size is still the bigger problem for most people out there and I wouldn't like to block my internet connection with 60GB patches either.
While my machine is strong enough to let me do things when a delta patch is applied. So I just can run it in the background, even if it takes some hours to complete.

Maybe. But most patching isn't going to be regex or replacing tons of small blocks with other small block, though that might be useful for some things, i was thinking more it would refer to say orig1:patch1:orig2:patch2:orig5 etc etc. More interweaving stuff, be it replacing or inserting data, not doing such small compression techniques. Besides, I'm sure said block size would be something like 4k, not 4 bytes. The only time you'd replace individual words/symbols, is if they happened to rename them internally and it propagates through the entire thing, which seems unlikely.

Reminds me a little of when i did assembly when i was 13. I wrote a file copy program as a test, simple and sweet. Slow as hell. Then when i changed it from getting 1 byte and writing 1 byte and looping, to 4k at a time, it suddenly ran swift, (though requiring a little more logical overhead).

Even Microsoft for NTFS with native compression abandoned space efficiency for speed, making the minimum size matches need to be like 8 bytes, vs being able to handle say 3-4 bytes for some compression.

Galaxy outright hijacks my computer whenever it has a patch to install. It needs to be reigned in and told in plain programming language what a background task should look like on the performance tab (i.e. not 100% disk usage).

If it takes twice as long, so what? At least I'll still be able to do other things. One game out of action for a bit is hardly much of an inconvenience.

Because delta updates are hard to predict.