EA Announces “In Place Updates” Patching Tech for Games, Reduces Disk Errors by 60%

Whether you like it or not, patching games have been a necessity in today’s gaming landscape, and that’s regardless if it’s a single-player game, multiplayer title or somewhere in between. It’s a not just a way for devs to slot in new features and content, but also to fix bugs and other adjustments, However, the file sizes of these patches have become bigger and bigger to the point that they’re getting to be a pain in the ass download and install. This is something Electronic Arts (EA) is aware of, and the company has done something about it with the introduction of “In Place Updates.”

EA has worked with Senior Software Engineer Hans van Veenend and his team to launch a “revolutionary piece of engineering” which the company calls “Known Version Patching” back in March. This has helped in radically reducing patch times and even costs. Since then, the tech has evolved with a new update that is known as “In Place Updates” (IPU), which is currently already running for most games on the EA App and helps players avoid the annoying “Out of Disk Space Error” issues .

When patching games, if the file needed to be downloaded was bigger than the allocated disk space a use had, they would get hit with a Disk Error message. The only wait to solve this is by the user deleting something on their disk drive, uninstall games or in some cases, the user doesn’t do anything about it at all and just move on.

According to Software Engineer Kenny Chen, ““We monitor the user experience through telemetry data, and we found that more than 60 percent of errors that occur during an update are disk space errors…In fact, our data showed over the course of a month that if someone had a Disk Space Error, they would likely hit it two or three more times that same month.”

In Place Updates avoids this problem by applying an algorithm that preserves unchanged content between game updates without creating temporary files and downloads the updated data directly into the target files. One example is: before, a 100MB patch that would previously create a huge 10GB temporary file, is no longer required to do so. Chen notes that their goal was to reduce disk space errors by 60%, and in doing with games with larger patch sizes, they are seeing a near 100% reduction (elimination) of disk space errors for players. Prior to the IPU tech, EA saw that well over half of their players had problems installing game updates because of the size. The publisher notes that with patch sizes getting smaller, the time it takes to download and install them is much shorter as well, and this can mean the difference between hours of waiting and minutes.

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

When it comes to patches and game updates, EA isn’t the only one conscious about it. Activision has announced a rolling size optimization plan for Call of Duty HQ just this August, which players will see start to materialize in Black Ops 6.

Speaking of game updates and patches, MP1st is the #1 source for accurate and timely title updates in the world. Bookmark our Title Updates page to see more of it.

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(Source: EA)