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The Internet Games

Call of Duty's Massive Filesize Drives Peak Internet Usage (theverge.com) 59

Posted by BeauHD from the internet-history dept.
Comcast says the latest installment of Call of Duty, released on October 25th, resulted in a whopping 19 percent of its overall traffic last week. The ISP says it's the company's "biggest weak in internet history." The Verge reports: It's not really possible to quantify that further, given Comcast didn't provide any specific numbers -- either about how many customers were downloading the game or how big their downloads were. Ranging between 84.4GB for the PlayStation version and 102GB for the PC edition Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, in the grand tradition of Call of Duty games, a hefty download. It can be as much as 300GB if players choose to go ahead and download Modern Warfare II and III and all the associated content packs and languages, as Activision explained in June. The announcement underscores "just how restrictive its 1.2TB data cap can be in 2024," notes The Verge. "For any players who did download the whole massive 300GB package, they'll have wiped out a huge chunk of their 1.2TB Xfinity data cap in one fell swoop."

"If they used their internet as normal otherwise, that could put them right up against or even blow past that cap. Given that my family used nearly 800GB last month without any notably large game downloads, it wouldn't be that hard at all."
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Call of Duty's Massive Filesize Drives Peak Internet Usage More

Call of Duty's Massive Filesize Drives Peak Internet Usage

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  • Big weak (Score:5, Funny)

    by Random361 ( 6742804 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @05:10PM (#64907523)
    Yeah, I have to say that Comcast probably is the "biggest weak in Internet history."
  • I doubt that the textures are so large as to use up all of that space. I know that some games use up a lot, but those are largely a result of massive amounts of audio due to extensive narration or everything having voice acting for a game that might span 80 hours of game play. I don't recall COD games being like that and it wasn't all that long ago when they had to fit on a DVD.

    Also it's the same file for everyone. An ISP should be able to cache it locally at their data center and cut down on the bandwid

    • This is one of those times when peer to peer file sharing protocols would be very, very useful.

      or just simple web caching, but the move to HTTPS for everything killed that, too

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        The announcement underscores "just how restrictive its 1.2TB data cap can be in 2024," notes The Verge. "For any players who did download the whole massive 300GB package, they'll have wiped out a huge chunk of their 1.2TB Xfinity data cap in one fell swoop."

        How would peer to peer solve this supposedly problem? People on Comcast would consume the same bandwidth wherever they download the updates from. Maybe sharing between Comcast users would mitigate the problem a bit but to which extend? Same for caching in Comcast servers, people would still consume the bandwidth.

        I say "supposedly" because I doubt that if their numbers are real, it's only due to a single game update. I don't know, maybe people consume more data close to the election or whatever other reason

        • Comcast has essentially no operational expenses when it transmits data between its own local customers. So, if everyone used P2P, Comcast could increase the cap without taking on any extra cost.

          Also, depending on the network metering, some approaches will essentially miss any packets that don't have to get routed home to Comcast.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            Yeah, that's what I was thinking, they'd have to offer some "free bandwidth between Comcast customers" deal or something like that or dedicate some caching to it. As long as it's metered in whatever they meter they have no incentive to change anything. That's why I find the announcement bizarre. I wouldn't have said anything about it if I was Comcast. It's almost sounded to me like they were trying to illustrate how much investment was required to maintain such a network.

        • Re: What's driving all of that? (Score:5, Informative)

          by oneiros27 ( 46144 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @08:35PM (#64907903) Homepage

          Sorry... for those who haven't worked for an ISP:

          the company's main costs for bandwidth are the line costs and the peering agreements. You generally want to reduce the amount of traffic coming from to the outside world, as you have a limited amount of bandwidth connecting you to the outside world.

          Then there's the issue of peering imbalances... if one internet provider is sucking down more bandwidth than they're pushing, that can make it to where one side has to pay. (the assumption that they have something that's important for you, and not visa-versa; I don't know if contracts have changed since I've been in the industry, as Youtube and similar now profit off of people pulling down their content)

          If everyone's downloading the same thing thing, it's so much better to get it onto your network, and then distributed to everyone. Caching and peer-to-peer do this. Many larger ISPs also let Netflix and other CDNs put servers in their networks so they only need to push one copy to the local server then distribute it from there to the ISP's users, dramatically cutting down on bandwidth used at the border. If this keeps up, it might be that they need to make similar agreements with the gaming companies.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            Depends on how long ago you've worked for an ISP I guess. /s

            Yeah, I know what caching is and often mention it. You are correct about that. How how peering imbalance resolved today? Back then, it was kind of counter-intuitive for the average joe IIRC: you were getting paid when your gateway was uploading stuuff, not downloading.

            Back in the days, nerds like us used to saturate whatever bandwidth you gave them. They even used buffer-bloat counter-measures so they'd see no effect.

            Nowadays, the average customer

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Bert64 ( 520050 )

              All ISPs massively over provision their customers. Look at the price gap between wholesale transit and what comcast charge consumers. Most users do very little traffic.

              If you're forced to NAT customers you should also ensure that IPv6 traffic has a clear path which bypasses the conntrack. The more traffic you're funneling through NAT the more it will cost you (think log tracking costs especially), you want to minimize that by using IPv6 as much as possible, plus it provides a better user experience.

          • This assumes fiber infrastructure, and FTTH, as, in practice, close enough to unlimited mid-mile and last-mile bandwidth.

            The problem is when you get rural ISPs using wireless backhauls, or areas where you can't be putting in fibre for whatever reason, and so on and so on, where bandwidth to the neighbourhood is limited.

      • The data caps are on the last mile so this wouldn't do anything to stop people from reaching their data caps.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Even if it were, they could take a leaf from kkrieger's book and use procedurally defined textures.

    • I can pirate a couple music artists entire discology in high bitrate quality and not even come close to 80 GB

    • You could fit a 24 hour long audiobook on one CD

      https://youtube.com/watch?v=QX... [youtube.com]

      Unless the narration sound files have a huge orchestra soundtrack in the background. But maximizing value and minimizing usage is just so 1980s/1990s.

  • When fiber came to town I got it day one and cancelled Xfinity crapcast once and for all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cito ( 1725214 )

      The only fiber in my area is Windstream which I'm happy for as they've never capped me. I was on 200 megabits bonded vdsl2 until they brought their fiber in that I instantly switched to. Hell I've even ran a seedbox from home for a few months that would have regularly passed Comcasts limits while I was moving my domain which I was lazy enough that it took a while to get off my ass and find a new host to move a seedbox and SHOUTcast stream to. And never had a problem (so far - knock on wood).

    • Same. A few months after fiber was put in my neighborhood, ATT (who was still offering DSL) started laying fiber. Comcast is getting upended everywhere a usable alternative pops up.

    • Pffft. When fibre came to town, I had an "episode", killed the neighbours and buried them in the other neighbour's back yard before calling the cops and filming it for TikTok points!

  • I feel old reading this (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @05:23PM (#64907555)

    Last year, I took a look at our actual internet consumption (my wife's and mine) and we came up at a stunning (for me) 48 GB / month. That's with the TV she watches, browsing, the occasional movie download and other mundane things. That number looks insane to me considering we're simply not doing anything heavy-duty on the internet.

    And here people are saying their one TERABYTE cap is restrictive because of ONE lousy game? Wow...

    • Depends on the content you're streaming. If it's 4K, you're going to add it up much quicker. Then consider households with kids. Now you 3x or 4x your traffic because you have that many more people streaming on their phones and TVs non-stop.

      But data does show that 90% of customers come nowhere close to the caps. It's a small group of heavy users who come close or go over such. That being said, I enjoy not having any cap on my 100Gbit fiber.

      • That all sounds like an excellent reason to charge by the GiB, with different rates depending either on time of day (e g., more between 6p-11p) or on congestion priority (user chooses if they want priority during congestion and pays more per byte).

    • Last year, I took a look at our actual internet consumption (my wife's and mine) and we came up at a stunning (for me) 48 GB / month.

      It still baffles me that people are surprised at the size of data (and baffles me that it would baffle people in a way that 48GB is considered a lot in a month for a household). If someone has a 4K TV and they watch Dune Part II on Netflix they will do ~20GB just in that one sitting, to say nothing of a month in a shared household.

      • Probably a combination of (1) mentally stuck in the Kazaa era of low-bitrate rips for CD-R, (2) in denial about the quantity, in hours, they consume.

        Probably they treat it like cable and just leave it on all evening for background noise. Except now everyone is looking at their own screen, so times the hourly consumption by 4.

    • As a digital nomad, I can hit 1TB in a day and often do.
  • Pfft. There was an official texture pack released this week for Space Marine 2, clocking in at 90GB alone. Install that and the footprint for the game is pushing 200GB.
    • I had XBox PC and was playing Forza Horizon and what killed me was half the time we sat down to play, it was time to load another 80 or 100 GB, which takes at least a few hours so there goes game night. There was no way it needed to download all that content yet again for a few bug fixes! Surely it could have been a few MB patch. They weren't even trying.
    • Yeah, it's not exactly a large package by today's standard, though there's probably a ton of people downloading it all at once. But I turned on the PS3 the other day and tried Gran Turismo... near 1GB of updates. Then MS Flight Sim on the PC, several gigabites. I remember playing Age of Conan, which had (for its time) fairly hefty updates as well... but they used a form of peer-to-peer distribution that made every update run smoothly.

  • I remember when games fit comfortably on a CD-ROM, and even on DVD-ROM you could store games that ended up looking surprisingly good for the time (Quake 3 Arena comes to mind).

    I'm still as big a tech fetishist as many here and I love the phat pipes to bits, but I do wonder if some of these digital titles are purposely oversized to help drum up business for super sized hard drives and net connections.

    • Q3 was on CD. I still have it somewhere. I must have uninstalled and reinstalled it quite a few times because I can still remember the CD key.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Let's just go back to physical media. "Please insert Blu-Ray Disc 6/14 to continue installation"

      • Let's just go back to physical media.

        Only if they also offer an optional floppy disk package... not all of us have those new-fangled drives you know!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by lexsco ( 594799 )
          I remember installing SCO Unix, probably on a 486 or Pentium in the early 90's and if memory servers, a full install was over 40 3 1/4" drives. And you could guarantee that if a disk was bad it would be # 38.

    • I don't think its to drive bigger net connections and hard drives, from what I observe of human nature its the opposite, as we get more we just consume more. It happens with a lot of things roads, computing power, water, electricity as the price goes down we simply consume more.

      If it took a week do download a game developers would just make smaller games, but as speeds go up they just increase the resolution of the game (in my opinion not the quality) .

      • Re:Utterly ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tim the Gecko ( 745081 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @06:48PM (#64907711)

        I don't think its to drive bigger net connections and hard drives, from what I observe of human nature its the opposite, as we get more we just consume more. It happens with a lot of things roads, computing power, water, electricity as the price goes down we simply consume more.

        See also Jevons paradox [wikipedia.org].

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          I don't think its to drive bigger net connections and hard drives, from what I observe of human nature its the opposite, as we get more we just consume more. It happens with a lot of things roads, computing power, water, electricity as the price goes down we simply consume more.

          See also Jevons paradox [wikipedia.org].

          Years ago I observed that no matter how wide an aisle is, a group of people will expand to fill it creating a roadblock.

          I first observed this effect in a branch of the Australian supermarket Coles [wikipedia.org] so I called it Coles Law.

      • "It happens with a lot of things roads, computing power, water, electricity as the price goes down we simply consume more."

        It could be the effect from being so boxed in and restricted for most of their lives tlso now they finally have room to stretch, breathe, and relax, and you bet that they will take that opportunity.

    • I remember when games fit comfortably on a CD-ROM

      CD-ROM? It's far more ridiculous if you go back in the old 8-bit days you could fit multiple games onto a 100kB single density 5.25 inch floppy disc and before that on audio cassettes. When you only have ~20kB or less of useable memory games don't need much storage and you could fit some insanely good games into that - the first version of Elite packed in 8 galaxies of 3D wireframe graphics and you could play it off audio cassette, although with the disk version you got missions and more ships since it cou

      • Indeed. I was mostly thinking in terms of 3D games, but there were also vector/wireframe 3D titles on floppies, likes Elite as you mention, or its followup. Or Spectre on the Mac.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vbdasc ( 146051 )

        Boomers remembering the happy years... /s

      • I mean, on one hand, Pool of Radiance, a full-on AD&D 2e campaign, shipped in four double-sided floppies for the C64.

        On the other hand, it came with a novel sized 'Adventurer's Journal' to hold all of the text that would have taken up way more floppies.

  • Playing this game over the years, it's safe to say this Franchise is ToasT without Real Leadership... We've gone from Trying to be the Leader, to Focusing on $Profits. There seems to be Zero focus on product Stability or Play-ability, as everybody is busy either cross-training with AI to reskin all the old maps (AGAIN) or modeling some new black skin that is nearly invisible on most maps. Thanks for that Lazy Pay to WIN... I have no idea why people continue to Pre-Pay for Garbage while the product being p

  • BitTorrent. It exists.

    Fucking use it.

  • They decided in 2010 that charging Akamai for data distribution was good business. So Akamai stopped investing in distribution servers on Comcast's network. Then since much of the data that used to flow internally, started in from outside (apparently largely via Level3), Comcast got into a tizzy with Level3. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobi... [cnet.com]

    Now 14 years later they are effectively complaining about their own dumb business decisions while trying to blame the game publisher.

  • It can be as much as 300GB if players choose to go ahead and download Modern Warfare II and III and all the associated content packs and languages

    How is this statement at all relevant? Oh wow, you mean if I download additional games they will use additional bandwidth?

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