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What happened to the PC games (or what happened to consoles)? (hexbear.net)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by LeylaLove@hexbear.net to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I got out of video game piracy for a while, but I'm coming back. One thing I have been absolutely SHOCKED by is how finding PC game torrents is actually kind of difficult from my normal sources. Now it'd be one thing if I just wasn't seeing games, but for some reason Playstation and Switch have far more uploaders and seeders on the sites. This is something that would have been unthinkable when I was into piracy. But from a quick glance, it looks like the Switch has a bigger piracy scene than PCs do right now. This was so extreme I couldn't find a torrent for Minecraft past 1.12. I found a download, but not a torrent. Or I couldn't find any of the old versions of Five Nights At Freddy's on PC, but could find them on other platforms. Things I'd consider true PC staples of the past decade with absolutely nothing popping up in my normal sources.

I'm not asking where to find PC torrents (although I certainly wouldn't mind). Are consoles actually becoming more popular to pirate for?

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[–] seaturtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I thought the file splits are based on size? But maybe I'm wrong. The larger games I have also tend to be Windows-only anyway so maybe I just don't know this stuff.

[–] drunkensailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

they are based on size but it's only the windows versions. for example, if you buy witcher 2, it has windows and linux versions. linux version is a single ~20 GiB file while the windows version has a small exe + lots of bin files that are 1.5 GiB or less and you need all of them to install.

[–] seaturtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I see. That's quite interesting. And I noticed that the Mac version is only split into 4 parts, with one clocking in at 11.6 GB (though others are capped at 4 GB).

I'm very curious why these differences exist.

[–] drunkensailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Oh yeah, completely forgot about Mac version lol.

As for why, no way to know for sure without inside info, but best guess is that they are trying to account for maximum file size limits across all the various possible Windows/Mac filesystem types but whichever employee setup the Linux ones realized that most Linux users wouldn't be using shitty Microsoft filesystems. FAT12 is fairly safe to ignore but they might have been considering FAT16 and HFS as the lowest common denominators, then making the files slightly smaller than the max file size just in case.

That or possible that they were balancing by network loads (since Windows versions probably account for around 99% of all downloads) and that was somehow determined to be the sweet spot.