I think they’re referring to games. A good example? CoD Modern Warfare (the recent one) _always_ seems to have 50GB updates. It is rather annoying, even with fast internet.

Modern Warfare is a nightmare. 50-80GB updates every month and no online play until you update. That can be over 12 hours for me. It's one thing I've noticed since getting a console recently after not having one since the PS2 era. Huge updates constantly. Even when you buy a disc they have to download a bunch of stuff. Such a horrible user experience.

Usually it's around 30GB. I play on PC and have to remind all of my party to update the night before. Each update seems to only come with small changes, and the total game size only increases by ~5GB usually. So they're either recompressing previous assets or changing stuff that can't be patched in along with new content. These updates usually happens every week/every other week. It's insane. I think all of the previous CoD:MW titles combined isn't as big as this one alone.

My girlfriend and I play with our old roommates most evenings as of late - we've gotten in the habit of turning on my gaming rig and her PS4 around lunch to suss out any updates. We are lucky to have symmetrical gig internet, but even with an Ethernet cable connected the PS4 download speeds abysmal. Those COD patches really are monstrous.

Newer games in general have these humongous updates. I’m somehow pleasantly surprised when checking that GTA V total size is 90GB all in. An open world online game with endless possibilities. Fortnite, a way simpler game, is ~70GB with monstrous patches too. I really wonder what is in those files..

Probably how the stuff is packaged for consoles where content is continuously streamed to make up for the limited memory on consoles and anemic CPU's so texture maps , world data and game logic are interleaved.

Patching all of that is difficult to it is probably easier to replace the content streams in one go.

This is the case for both PC and consoles for this game :).

I can't remember a time I've downloaded a patch that is as big as the base game on a console. Granted, most of the games I play are on physical copies.