13GB Dead Rising 3 Patch Raises Questions About Gaming’s Future

There’s a 13GB update live for Dead Rising 3 today, and if you think that seems kind of big, well, that’s because it’s kind of big.



This is one of the biggest patches in video game history — our previous definition of “big patch” usually clocked in at 500MB or a gigabyte — and it’s designed to both fix issues and “ensure compatibility with the online players and all of the upcoming add-on content that’s coming out shortly as well,” according to executive producer Josh Bridge. The Xbox One game’s first piece of DLC, Operation Broken Eagle, comes out tomorrow.

You can dodge the patch by disconnecting your router or your Xbox One, but if you want to play Dead Rising 3 while online, you have to download the update. And, really, while this might be kind of annoying if you have a slow Internet connection, it’s not that big a deal… unless you have a data cap. If your cable company limits the amount of bandwidth you can use every month, this could be a serious problem.

As one Redditor writes: “This is bullshit. I live in a rural area and the best internet I can get has a 20GB a month bandwidth allowance.”

The caps aren’t usually that drastic, but not everyone is lucky enough to have a broadband connection with unlimited bandwidth, and if net neutrality goes awry, things could get even worse soon.

So now it’s time to start asking questions. Is this sort of massive patching going to be the norm in this generation of gaming consoles? As game updates continue to get bigger, will ISPs feel more inclined to limit our bandwidth? Does anyone else get the feeling something bad is going to happen?