In the recent years gaming has made a transition from physical discs being the most common distribution medium to digital distribution being the most popular. This was perfectly fine a few years ago when the average game download didn't exceed a twenty gigabyte download size, but today games download sizes can be double or even triple that. For many consumers this causes 2 major problems. The first being hard drive space, the average computer usually contains a hard drive able to hold 500 gigabytes to one terabyte (a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes) while this allows for quite a few games to be installed currently it could pose a problem in the future where, if games continue increasing the amount of space needed to install, would result in the user only being able to install a small handful of games at a time. The other problem (and one I and many others around here suffer from) is dreadfully slow download speeds. In cities with dense population packed closely together it's easy to provide them with say, fiber optic cables (which have incredibly fast transfer rates resulting in download speed of potentially a gigabyte per second) but around small low population areas like the small foothill town I live in it's considered a miracle for a download speed to reach 800 kilobytes a second (1024 kilobytes to a megabyte and 1024 megabytes to a gigabyte) which means if I want to download a game it can be a process that spans multiple days when it should only be a couple of hours. In example the recently released on pc Grand Theft Auto 5 had a download size of over sixty gigabytes, this took me literally two full days to download and put an level of strain on my aging system that it shouldn't be subjected to.
The way I see it the only solutions to these problems would be to a. discover a new way to optimize games, further reducing the size needed to install. b. Find a way to make larger hard drives a cheaper and more accessible option for future systems. c. Find a cost effective way to provide even low population areas with fiber optic internet cables. While a and b are more likely to happen its unfortunately a fools dream to hope for things such c because areas like mine wouldn't generate enough cash for the companies providing fiber optic internet service to consider it a viable option.
pictured is an internet speed test done on my computer notice the F grade and slower than 81% of US
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