It’s not that I don’t trust, but I want to understand. What is actually happening and how do these Repack thingies work?
And why are they called that 😂
Thanks in advance.
Edit: thanks so much for the replies all, I think I got it! :)
Also please please support FitGirl by donating via crypto. Send your shit coins to her so those coins can actually be useful for once.
Firgirl repacks are a godsend. Just being able to not download the languages you don’t need is amazing, all games should allow that by default. Why should I download extra 50GB of content in languages I won’t use?
So the hierarchy generally goes like this:
- You have a game
- Then you have your patch and crack makers that circumvent the games DRM. This game and patch ingredient box is called a “release”
- Then you have your repackers like fitgirl and dodi that take a release, apply the included patch to the game, make sure everything is configured and the game runs, then compress the whole thing heavily, sometimes reducing everything by up to 50%, then break the package up into a handful of large chunks, some of those chunks being things that you might not want, making them optional to you, like the soundtrack, alternative language audio packs, etc.
Because everything is so damn compressed, a game will usually take a long time to install, because your computer is literally re-inflating the bouncy castle. A lot of people will take those install times over the download sizes of the original releases which I think clarifies most who these repackers actually serve.
They exist for people with data caps and slow internet. If you can avoid downloading languages and soundtracks you don’t want in the first place then that saves you much needed data and time. And even though installation (which is actually just decompression) takes an age, it’s still faster than terrible internet downloading twice as much.
literally re-inflating the bouncy castle
What if my computer isn’t attached to a bouncy castle? Do I need to buy special hardware for this?
! () [] for inserted images!
Repacks are only useful if your internet is from third world countries, like 100Mbps
In Europe repacks are useless
Edit: apparently Germany doesn’t seem to have normal speeds
German infrastructure has been neglected for several decades. In the past, the whole phone grid was nationalized under the Deutsche Telekom, which eventually got spun off into a regular company.
For some insane reason the government basically let them keep almost all of the existing telecommunications infrastructure, giving them a quasi monopoly for many years and the lobbying power to delay upgrading the grid to modern fibre connections in favor of squeezing marginal improvements out of the old copper wires.
Even today the upgrading is going slowly, but at least in cities the connections are reasonably fast, I have about 300 mbits in a fairly small town (about 200k people)
100Mbps is average affordable speed in Australia sadly. The pro big business political party here (LNP) sabotaged our nationwide fibre rollout commenced in 2007. It’s taken this bloody long to finally begin undo the deliberate sabotage of our nation’s broadband infrastructure done to benefit Rupert Murdoch & the incumbent monopolist Telco.
They are great for both those with slow connections and for archival purposes
