Topic: Installation

Why do Nintendo games install fast or not need to be installed but my Xbox One physical games take forever to Install? I just put in a disc in my Xbox One and over an hour later only 40% installed. Is it my Internet speed? My Nintendo games even Wii U discs never take that long to boot up or install. Anyone experienced the same?

Cartridges have a faster read speed, so they do not need to be "installed" in order to play. Optical discs such as DVDs and Blu-ray discs do not have the necessary bandwidth (in most cases) for games with the level of complexity that they have now to be playable from the disc itself. Less complex games should be playable, but in most instances, developers take the easy way out and impose an installation and/or download.

As for the Wii U, perhaps the Wii U optical discs, being a proprietary format (although superficially based on Blu-ray) probably had more bandwidth than a standard Blu-ray disc, hence why most games are playable from the disc without any further installation, including open-world games such as Watch_Dogs.

Developers have also become quite lazy (or publishers are imposing unreasonable deadlines), hence why so many do not adequately optimise their games for the format and rush them out to store shelves in the state that they do. It is easier (and cheaper) for developers to impose an installation (with their abundance of junk data) than it would be to make the game playable from the disc alone and ensure that only relevant data remains on the disc.

Internet speed shouldn't have anything to do with the length of time required as the software is extracting data from the disc itself, and if it is a particularly large disc (say 40GB), you could easily be waiting for about an hour (if not more) for the data to be extracted to your system. A slow external hard drive can also be a contributing factor.

@sillygostly
I guess in this case I should go for Switch port of games that also are on Xbox One like Skyrim or South Park the Fractured but Whole whenever possible. That way I don’t have to wait for excessive installation and also get to play them on the go as well. I think the only big downside is the achievements that I don’t think are available in Switch versions.

The Wii U didn't have a significantly faster optical drive and there were Wii U games that required an install. It's just that most games on Wii U ran at 720p and there weren't that many massive games on the Wii U in general. Breath of the Wild and Xenoblade had installs from memory but I'm not sure there were many others.

Also both the Wii U and especially the Switch have limited storage by default so developers have to build these games with that in mind. They also have to take into account the other specs of the console and how much faster moving the game off the disc will improve loading times. A lot of the reason for slow loading times is the CPU not the disc and with less VRAM than the XBOne/PS4 you can't have super high resolution models/textures anyways.

And as you correctly said with the Switch it uses cartridges which are significantly faster than optical media. The entire reason for these installs is to get around the slow read speeds of optical discs by putting the game on the much faster HDD/flash. If you're already on a cartridge there's no need for that.

@Don Keep in mind that the installation and downloading are 2 different things. If you get a game that needs a download first, and you have low download speed, that can slow things down considerably. Since most games these days, especially on Xbone and PS4 have a day 1 update and regular updates past it, you are almost guaranteed that you will need to download at least something.