EA announces “In Place Updates” patching technology for games that reduces hard drive errors by 60%

Like it or not, game patching is a necessity in today’s gaming landscape, whether it’s a single-player game, a multiplayer title, or anywhere in between. It’s not only a way for developers to add new features and content, but also to fix bugs and make other customizations. However, the file sizes of these patches have become increasingly larger, making them increasingly annoying to download and install. Electronic Arts (EA) is aware of this and has done something about it by introducing “In Place Updates”.

EA worked with senior software engineer Hans van Veenend and his team to bring a “revolutionary piece of technology” to market back in March, which the company calls “Known Version Patching.” This has helped to dramatically reduce patching times and even costs. Since then, the technology has evolved with a new update called “In Place Updates” (IPU) currently running for most games in the EA app, helping players avoid the annoying “Out of Disk Space Error” issues .

When patching games, if the file being downloaded was larger than the allocated space a user had, a disk error message would appear. The only way to solve this problem is for the user to delete something on their hard drive, uninstall games, or in some cases not do so anything even talk about it and just move on.

According to software engineer Kenny Chen, “We monitor the user experience through telemetry data and have found that more than 60 percent of errors that occur during an update are disk space errors… In fact, our data showed over a month of when someone encounters a disk space error If he had, he would probably meet him again two or three times in the same month.”

In Place Updates avoids this problem by applying an algorithm that maintains unchanged content between game updates without creating temporary files and downloads the updated data directly to the target files. An example is: Previously, a 100MB patch that previously created a huge 10GB temporary file was no longer required for this. Chen points out that their goal was to reduce disk space errors by 60%, and that in games with larger patch sizes they are seeing a near 100% reduction (elimination) of disk space errors for players. Before introducing IPU technology, EA found that well over half of their players had trouble installing game updates due to the size. The publisher points out that as patch sizes get smaller, the time to download and install also becomes much shorter, which can mean the difference between hours and minutes of waiting.

EA boasts that the EA app is the only PC platform that supports this technology.

When it comes to patches and game updates, EA isn’t the only one aware of it. Activision just announced an ongoing sizing plan for Call of Duty HQ in August of this year, which will begin rolling out for players in Black Ops 6.

Speaking of game updates and patches, MP1st is the world’s leading source for accurate and timely title updates. Bookmark our Title Updates page to see more like this.

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[Source: EA]