Breakthrough game patching tech evolves

Video games, simply, are getting bigger. File sizes are increasing–for good reason. Our world-class storytellers and artists are creating more incredible experiences than ever before, and from that, players get to dive into beautiful, rich worlds chock-full of immersive environments and fully realized and authentic characters, all while participating in beloved games such as those found in our biggest franchises..

But when a game needs to be patched, each time it can bring a large file to both download and install. And as our games continue to evolve and grow, the patch sizes do too. It can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process and we want our players and fans to play, watch, create, connect, and celebrate culture and fandom with their favorite communities as seamlessly as possible. 

This is why back in March, thanks to the remarkable work of Senior Software Engineer Hans van Veenendaal and his team, we launched a revolutionary piece of engineering called Known Version Patching. It has been radically reducing patch times, helping players and fans across the globe get back into playing their favorite titles sooner, bringing down costs, and supporting the company’s net zero commitment.

And today, it has further evolved with a new update that is known as In Place Updates (IPU). With the help of Kenny Chen, Software Engineer, the team including Kirby Burchill, Trevor Duong, and Hans, IPU has made the next leap forward. It is currently already running for most games on the EA app, benefiting millions of players around the world to get back to playing and almost entirely avoid a pain point for all our players–the Out of Disk Space Error.

“We monitor the user experience through data, and we found that more than 60 percent of errors that occur during an update are Disk Space Errors.”

What does In Place Updates actually do?

Game patches–which are critical to keeping games up and running, in addition to adding new content, expanding worlds, and making our games even better–have continued to grow in size. In fact, sometimes it would require as much space as the entire game to be available on the end-user machine to fully update. That could be 100+ GB of data to have open at any time.

If they don’t have the space, the user would get hit with a Disk Space Error. And with that, the game can’t be updated until more space is made available. This requires players to delete anything they can find or uninstall games and programs. Worst case? They decide to not do anything about it and move on.

And it’s becoming a more prevalent issue.

“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,” says Kenny. “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.”

“That’s really annoying for the player,” adds Kenny.

IPU aims to avoid this problem. It works 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. That could mean a 100 MB patch, which previously would create a 10GB temporary file, no longer needs to do so. 

The goal was to reduce disk space errors by 60 percent. The results? 

“We’ve smashed those targets,” says Kirby.

For our games with larger patch sizes, we are seeing a near 100 percent reduction–an elimination–of disk space errors for our players. Prior to this feature well over half of our players had problems installing game updates because of their size.

In addition, as patch sizes are much smaller, the time it takes to download and apply them is much shorter. This can mean the difference between hours of waiting and minutes.

“It’s been exciting to see this project launch to such success. I am happy to see it work and help all of our players.”

EA app is the only PC platform to support this tech

Kenny, Hans, Kirby, Trevor and the rest of the engineering team are doing incredible work, putting together innovative pieces of software engineering that are benefiting millions of our players and fans around the world.

After the success of IPU, Kenny is now leading another project for the team. A remarkable accomplishment for a Software Engineer whose first lead project was IPU, and we are thrilled to see where he goes from here.

“It’s been exciting to see this project launch to such success,” says Kenny. “I am happy to see it work and help all of our players.”

"The EA app is the only PC platform that supports this innovative technology and because of our amazing team and technology investments we’ve been able to roll this out to players with ease," adds Joe Traverso, Vice President of EA Experiences - Commerce, Social, and Subscription. "This is just one of many investments we are making on our mission to make EA app the best place to purchase and play EA’s games."

Join EA, where our mission is to inspire the world to play, and we believe there’s nothing that we cannot accomplish, together.

IPU was developed by the following team members: Hans van Veenendaal, Kenny Chen, Leo Teng of Engineering, Pavel Braila of QV and Trevor Duong of DD.