Tragedy strikes the gaming community once more with this latest development in next gen console difficulties. It seems that excited gamers have grossly overestimated the speeds with which their Broadband Internet connections are capable of direct downloading games. These next generation games are packed with quite a bit a data, and as such, some of them wind up being as big as 50 GB without any applied updates.
In a recent survey by Virgin Media, 78% of UK gamers thought that a 50 GB game would be downloaded and ready to play within five hours, with 42% of that figure thinking games would be ready in less than two hours. Due to slow broadband spends, the average download time in the UK wound up taking seven and a half hours in total.
Virgin Media’s director of broadband and home phone commented: “Anyone considering buying a next generation games console, now or for Christmas, should also think carefully about whether they’ve got the broadband to make the most of it. Virgin Media customers are set to get a substantial head start, and could be many levels ahead while others are still waiting.”
He continued, “Before we know it, big game launches won’t be measured by queues outside stores at midnight, but by whether or not we see a surge in downloads across our network!”
Here’s a chart with estimated download times based on broadband speeds:
Research carried out by OnePoll with 2,000 UK adult who use games consoles in November 2013.
Home broadband speed Estimated download time for one 50GB game. Download speeds assuming 90% of bandwidth available to customers is used.
-0.5Mb -10.7 days
-2Mb -2.7 days (65 hours)
-10Mb -13 hours
-14.7Mb (national average) -8 hr 48 mins
-30Mb -4 hr 19 mins
-60Mb -2 hr 9 mins
-120Mb -65 mins
-152Mb (coming 2014 from VM) -51 mins
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