I'm in the USA with 3mbps average download speed. Fine for streaming, but when I used to play games and my friends wanted to switch to a large game (Sea of Theft, say, or Rat Slaughter 2, whatever they're called) I'd set it to download overnight. I don't consider this a problem.

PS5 has a similar system to let you start playing (properly designed) games before downloading is complete.

I know iOS has something like that, though o don’t think I’ve ever seen it used.

And I’d expect Xbox does as well, but I’m not in that ecosystem so I don’t know as much about their features.

That sounds like a lot of engineering effort for something with minimal payoff. Carefully balancing early vs late offsets for the one time payoff of playing while the game is still downloading. So many potential failure states vs just saying, "Wait another hour and then start"

To you it might sound like a lot of effort but for a user who is on his 1 day off for the week not having to wait twice the amount of time to log in to play his game probably means more than you or I could ever imagine. Blizzard used to be about making everyone have an excellent experience and some of the legacy features they've had for years seriously still do show what kind of commitments to that fact they have made in the past.

I think you're also over-estimating how hard it is to flag something as not-necessary for the majority of users. Especially when downloading a fresh copy of a new expansion. If you know most players aren't going to be in the final boss lair for 3 weeks but still ship the game with that content it's not unimaginable to just allow the game to download those files in the background.

Blizzards downloaded is top tier. The startup time from initial, bare bones install to playable is very fast.

It starts with placeholder content to get you running, and anything immediately necessary for your area. For example, if you’re in a capital city, it doesn’t wait to download the entire city, just where you are. It can rough out the other areas and add details almost in real time as you start making your way through it.

Things get more difficult if you mount up and start flying more world to load, but even still it doesn’t load it all.

There’s certainly a cost, there can be FPS loss during busy areas, but by the time you get to something important, it should all be loaded.

Contrived example is you’re in a raid, some reason you feel you need to reinstall, you could do that, fire up the game, it’ll load the raid and by the time you hit the first boss, it’ll all be there. This will take minutes.

Since I leave the client running, it updates in the background. During new releases it starts to download the entirety of the new release a couple of weeks before it’s due, to get the bulk of the content down. When they cut the release, it’s typically a much smaller update to turn the new content on. I rarely have to wait to play the game.

Experiencing a few other games makes me really appreciate the work Blizzard had done in this regard. It’s top drawer.

Gaming industry is notoriously crunch time. Feels a hard ask to spend any resources on partially downloaded gameplay vs the mountain of bugs which likely exist in the non-quantum state of download-or-not.

Steam supports this as well but actually I have read that it is a lot of effort.

Firstly, your entire asset pipeline which combines and compresses resources needs to be aware of it.

Secondly, it's work that can't be reused cross platform. (The effort for Steam will not apply to PS5&etc).

Thirdly, it's another configuration to test, and as the user will forget about the feature after they get started playing, it's natural to just say it's too much effort.

Xbox does. I think it was there at the beginning of the Xbox One Gen?

That’s what I thought I remembered hearing about.