Why are there patch sizes equal to game sizes?

I thought the definition of a patch was small little code updates to fix little problems.

On the Xbox 360 I've seen one patch measured in bytes with no metric prefix yes less than 1K. And that was for a disc-sized game of Super Street Fighter 4.

Nowadays on the Xbox One if a game takes two gigs which is small for online games today why does it take two gigs to replace two gigs if something small is changing.

To me that sounds like retyping the whole text of War and Peace just to turn a colon into a semicolon. Oh and one more thing Colombo's catchphrase I just previously quoted came about because lazy writers did not want to retype whole pages.

Some people have data quantity limits. Some people have data speed limits. If it weren't for Visible Wireless I'd be at the mercy of my DSL which only gives me 1.6 Meg in 400k out. And this is a home internet we're talking about.

Now I see why I quit the Xbox habit a long time ago because in order to download a game I have to sit and wait hours to load a clone of the game with one piece of different code.

You should do something about this abusive bandwidth for people who can't access it.

If programs were medical patients, you're giving heart surgery and brain surgery to a guy who just has a hangnail.

I understand it's mostly third parties that abuse this. Maybe if you gave third parties incentives to fix their code in terms of "delta changes" instead of raw ROM dumps, maybe I'd be playing Xbox more instead of waiting 24 hours every time I want to play Xbox.

submitted by /u/tripletopper
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