Comment by fleabitdev
24 days ago
Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher.
In other words, the game studio externalised an eight-figure hardware cost onto their users, to avoid a five-to-six-figure engineering cost on their side.
Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam, because it's a legitimate optimisation in some cases. The only safeguard against this sort of waste is a company culture which values software quality. I'm glad the developers fixed this bug, but it should never have been released to users in the first place.
>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam
Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0])
[0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/
You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...). I still find these things hard to accept.
Here’s a funny one from Halo Infinite network downloading the same picture thousands of times: https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/w5af08/infinite_downl...
Steam update durations depend on compression + CPU performance + SSD I/O. Things will be harder when the disk is almost full and live defragmentation kicks in to get free space for contiguous files. Some SSDs are fast enough to keep up with such a load, but a lot of them will quickly hit their DRAM limits and suddenly that advertised gigabyte per second write speed isn't all that fast. Bonus points for when your SSD doesn't have a heatsink and moving air over it, making the controller throttle hard.
Patching 150GiB with a compressed 15GiB download just takes a lot of I/O. The alternative is downloading a fresh copy of the 150GiB install file, but those playing on DSL will probably let their SSD whizz a few minutes longer than spend another day downloading updates.
If your SSD is slower than your internet capacity, deleting install files and re-downloading the entire game will probably save you some time.
Their update where they got $10k reward from R* brought a smile to my face
In this case, the bug was 131 GB of wasted disk space after installation. Because the waste came from duplicate files, it should have had little impact on download size (unless there's a separate bug in the installer...)
This is why the cost of the bug was so easy for the studio to ignore. An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years, so they might have asked the game studio to look into it.
This article presents it as a big success, but it could be read the opposite way: "Developers of Helldivers 2 wasted 130 GB for years and didn't care because it was others people computers"
> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years
Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.
It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P
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Makes sense, initial claim was that HD2 size was mainly because of duplicated assets, and any compression worth it's salt would de-duplicate things effectively.
From the story:
> Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect.
It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and performed the wrong optimisation as a result.
As a player of the game, I didn't really care that it took up so much space on my PC. I have 2TB dedicated for gaming.
Why not offer 2 versions for download and let the user choose, whether they want to block their whole disk with a single game, or accept a bit longer loading times? Or let the user at installation time make an informed decision by explaining the supposed optimization? Or let the user decide before downloading, what resolution (ergo textures) they want as the highest resolution they will play the game at and only download the textures they need up to that resolution?
Questions, questions, questions.
Because all of these suggestions require developer resources. Doing a quick web search it is estimated they have ~150 employees. A lot of triple-A studios have thousands or ten of thousands of employees. So they are relatively small game studio.
Also note that they are adding more game modes, mode warbonds, and the game is multi-platform and multiplayer. The dev team is relatively small compared to other game studios.
The game engine the game is built in is discontinued and I believe is unsupported. IIRC they are rewriting the game in UE5 because of the issues with the unsupported engine.
A lot of people have problems with Arrowhead (there been some drama between Arrowhead and the community). The install size of the game while a problem wasn't like the top problem. Bigger issues in my mind as someone that plays the game regular is:
e.g.
- The newest updates to the game with some of new enemy types which are quite unfair to fight against IMO (Dragon Roach and the War Strider).
- The other complaint was performance/stability of the game was causing issues with streamers PCs. Some people claimed the game was breaking their PCs (I think this was BS and their PCs were just broken anyway). However there was a problem with performance in the game, which was resolved with a patch a few weeks ago. That greatly improved the game IMO.
I can't answer all of this questions, but "why not offer 2 versions and allow the user to choose" was mentioned here [0].
Helldivers 2 is a multiplayer game, for the game 2 start, everyone in the lobby needs the game to be fully loaded. If one person would choose to have a slower version, it would make everyone wait longer. Which is definitely not a trade off you are willing to make as a game developer because makes the experience for other players worse.
There could be other options and better optimizations, such as lower textures that you mentioned, but I agree with the developers on having only a "fast version".
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/helldivers-2-dev-explai...
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SSD or HDD?
SSD. Prices got reasonable sometime last year for 2TB NVME/SSD
> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month
Out of curiousity, how do you come up with a number for this? I would have zero idea of how to even start estimating such a thing, or even being able to tell you whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers.
I'd be very interested in hearing alternative estimates, but here's my working:
The lowest cost I could find to rent a server SSD was US$5 per TB-month, and it's often much higher. If we assume that markets are efficient (or inefficient in a way that disadvantages gaming PCs), we could stop thinking there and just use US$2.50 as a conservative lower bound.
I checked the cost of buying a machine with a 2 TB rather than 1 TB SSD; it varied a lot by manufacturer, but it seemed to line up with $2.50 to $5 per TB-month on a two-to-five-year upgrade cycle.
One reason I halved the number is because some users (say, a teenager who only plays one game) might have lots of unused space in their SSD, so wasting that space doesn't directly cost them anything. However, unused storage costs money, and the "default" or "safe" size of the SSD in a gaming PC is mostly determined by the size of games - so install size bloat may explain why that "free" space was purchased in the first place.
> whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers
As long as storage has a price, use of storage will have a price :-)
Maybe average cost of next-size-up SSD price divided by a SWAG of a gaming PC lifetime? So if I had to buy a 2 TB NVMe stick instead of a 1 TB stick it's an extra $70 and I upgrade after 5 years that's only about $1 per TB-Month. I don't game I have no idea if those are good numbers.
The cheapest storage tier on s3 with instant retrieval is $.004 per GB-Month which implies AWS can still make money at $4 per TB-Month so $2.50 for consumer hardware sounds reasonable to me.
"having one less game installed on your SSD" isn't exactly same as cost per TB, it's just slight wasted convenience at worst
> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month
Where are you getting this number from? Not necessarily arguing with it, just curious.
I should probably look up the company that made the game or the publisher and avoid games they make in the future.
That would be a shame because the game is honestly very good despite its flaws, is a lot of fun and has a decent community.
Good luck convincing the MBA's with spreadsheets that 'software quality' is of any value whatsoever.