Halo Infinite is chewing up lots of data with up to 1GB used per every two matches.
Users have found that Halo Infinite is using an incredible amount of data bandwidth that's not related to direct gameplay. The community has now advised gamers who have data caps to avoid playing Infinite in its current state. The main culprit is that Infinite is continually re-downloading a high-resolution image thousands upon thousands of times, causing a significant spike in data usage.
"Infinite downloads the Season 2 Banner image about 1000-2000 times, which amounts to around 1-1.5GBs of Data being wasted. Downloads stop while you're in a match, but after you quit into the menu it starts downloading again," reads a Reddit post. "This should be an easily-fixable issue on 343's side."
343 Industries is summarily grilled by players and IT specialists in the post's comments.
"6 years of development and still making beginner coding mistakes," writes Redditor Trailstorm.
SuperBAMF007 writes:
Literally all of these things should be downloaded in the update at the start of the season. This isn't a web browser. This is an application. We don't need EVERYTHING delivered via CDN EVERY time.
The only thing that needs to be delivered dynamically is the shop update. But even that's weekly at this point, so what's the harm in having the shop take 30 seconds to load the first time, and then load instantly the rest of the week because now it's all local?
No wonder they have network/server issues. The load of X amount of players downloading things is stressful on hardware. Now that we know we're ALWAYS downloading things in excess of multiple gigabytes a day/week? That's insane.
SenatorObama follows up with another scathing remark:
It's even worse than this.
It means that, either:
- The server isn't putting caching headers on static resource-type responses as appropriate.
- They somehow managed to use a fucking HTTP client library that doesn't respect those. Or they re-create the HTTP client regularly instead of re-using one.
It's just fucking amateurish across the board. It's totally fine to rely on HTTP server/client caching... if you fucking use it. Jesus Christ 343i, come on.
It's here I would like to re-iterate that Microsoft is one of the largest players in the video games industry and is on track to make a record $15 billion+ in Xbox gaming revenues this fiscal year.
Luckily, 343 Industries community manager John Junyshek confirms the studio is investigating the issue.