Is this why steam is so insanely slow to download games.

This implies fitgirl is doing it properly. Which it’s trade off faster download longer install times or vice versa.

I actually didn’t know that the whole point of fitgirl was for compression

The whole point of view of the article is about people from countries that can’t afford the modern AAA price, internet bandwidth… and even PC capable to run the game decently (AAA the full price always take in account hardware that runs on “Ultra settings”; not the customers running it at very low).

As aside note, piracy isn’t even about piracy itself anymore: someone who buy an AAA videogame on “exclusivity store” (such as Epic)… soon or later will discover that’s easier to store a fitgirl copy of his purchase to run the same game seamelessly across all the PC in their household (good old: Install > Next > Next > Finish) … rather having set up those 2+3 launcher per PC.

It can be, spinning iron has pretty bad throughput.

Honestly I can’t remember the last time a fitgirl release took longer to install than an ‘official’ copy.

And pretty much as long as I’ve had a computer it’s been “bottom of the barrel” hardware.

DODI works better on Linux tho

Yeah I think it ends up waiting for slower storage if your cpu or HDD are too slow. I experience that with slower sdcards on the Deck.

But on a decent NVMe with a balanced CPU the download and disk are full bore and the CPU usage goes really high.

Ahh yeah this could be. My system isn’t by any means crazy but it is modern. A tuned 5600x (draws about 115W at full load) and an nvme 3.0 ssd. I’m being bottlenecked by internet bandwidth at the moment.

I prefer Prowlarr personally but yes Jackett is great.

Could be a variety of things but yes. It also depends on the game and how compressible it’s assets are.

I mainly had trouble on the steam deck, in the early days. Most people recommended unpacking on a windows PC and transferring the files back then. It might be easier now, but it is more trouble than a game dump.

The thing about compression is you have to process it to decompress it. It may be benificial to people with limited bandwidth, or for peer-to-peer sharing, but it’s probably better for most users for someone like Valve to share the uncompressed version. Bandwidth isn’t the issue it used to be.

It also makes progressive updates harder. The best you can do is compress each update individually, not the whole package.

Yesterday I tried to mod persona 4 golden on Linux. After a couple hours of headaches and some help from the developer, I finally managed to fix the problem and launch persona aaaaand denuvo shut it down.

Denuvo literally shut down my legal version of P4G because I used one too many versions of proton. This is why I support fitgirl

Same thing happened to me with Street fighter 6. I was just trying to get it to run and kept switching proton versions and it got locked.

Decompression during install is generally less of a bottleneck than network bandwidth, so fitgirl is doing it properly.

Folks here are like “everyone uses it. Eventually all gamers realize it’s better”

Me, having never even heard of this in my 30 years of gaming: 🫣

If you can afford it. Might be a better option, or least send the devs some support while using repacks.

Honestly, I think this is a case-by-case basis. I don’t weep for EA losing money when people acquire The Sims for example. The people that did the heavy lifting already got paid, and the less money that’s going into the Trump Empire and Saudi Arabian pockets the better.

That’s almost besides the point, though. We’re living in a time where if you buy something you for the most part don’t own it. Buy an EV? Then the battery is rented. Buy an iPhone? You don’t get to choose what software or hardware to put in it, only Apple batteries are acceptable else your screen/camera/faceID array will magically stop working. Android phones are barking down the same route.

Buy an eBook/Audiobook from Amazon? Well they can edit and redact it whenever they please. A film from iTunes? DRMed, bound to die whenever Apple decides to no longer support your platform. Video game? You get a license to run the software, nothing more.

There are studios I feel happy supporting, ones that treat their customers and their workers right. Don’t think a single one of them is a AAA studio though. Like, why should I pay Bethesda when they don’t pay their musicians?

EA: please take it out of the game.

Same. I had no idea what the title meant at all. Interesting though.

I used fit girl for a game I didn’t know if my first pc build would run a game I wanted to buy. It didn’t work, I upgraded my pc and tried it again and then it worked.

I’m glad they are around now that I’m trying to learn about pc gaming.