I was thinking of getting the 1TB hard drive Xbox Console for 349.99 instead. However most of the games included with the majority of the consoles does not include any game disc and yet you have to download the games. If I have cable internet does that take hours to download. I presume it would in gigabytes to download the game. Why not include the discs ?
PoohBearPenguin
If you buy a game in the store, it will have a disc. However, when you first play the game it will need to copy the disc to your hard drive which will take a few minutes, depending on how large the game is.
Updates for the game are automatically downloaded when you go online. The size of these updates can vary from very small to very large.
The worst offender I've encountered so far is the retail version of Destiny: The Taken King. This is Destiny with all the addons, including The Taken King. However the package only includes the base Destiny game disc and a series of online codes for everything else. So the game copied to my hard drive (23GB) and then needed to do updates which not only overwrote the original games' files but also included all the addons even though I hadn't activated them yet. This resulted in the game downloading over 50GB as an "update." Seriously I don't even know why it bothered with that initial 23GB copy from the blu-ray disc.
I have reasonably fast internet but this still took about 2-3 hours to download enough of the game so I could start playing. The rest of the download took another 3 hours, so yes it took about 6 hours to fully download the 50-odd gigabytes.
Your times will depend on your speed, although cable internet tends to be about the fastest you can get so it shouldn't take that long.
John M
It can take 1/2 a day and sometimes longer to download a game some of them are huge. It really depends on your bandwidth. There are enough good games that are discounted now to keep you busy for a long time. I buy the disk instead of the download even then you have to load the updates and add on but it is still much faster.
Dawn M
yes it takes forever to download. i had one and only kept it a month. i ended up buying a ps4 and like it.