that analogy is fallacious. so i won't address it.

but basically, steam uses an overwrite system, they don't do patching. if you want to complain, tell steam to turn off auto patching and have cdpr send out standalone steam patch versions.

this is how steam operates. you can't expect companies to do 2 versions of every game just because steam's patching system sucks.

There are already different versions of the game, GOG, Retail/D2D and Steam are all different versions, very very very bad argument. ;p

And it is not like it's very hard to simply extract that big file and provide the unpacked version of the game, it is done in 5 minutes. xD

This totally sucks, and I'm thinking about leaving steam altogether.

And to think, there's already a patch in the works for next week. Will have to do it all over again...

total BS, been on steam since 2004, have 50 games on it, not ONCE has this happened. steam does not just do this.
You are so mis-informed its ridiculous. This is NOT how steam works, there is obviously something wrong here.

Yeah I've never seen a game re-download itself for a patch.

He's completely right. Just because you have 50 games there doesn't mean anything. I have over 300 and I agree with him. Steam does not distribute patch files, but patched files. That is why when you download an old game, it is already patched. That is why games with lots of small fiels are patched quickly with small downloads, and games with big files like TW2, have huge downloads.

This is disappointing. I don't have unlimited bandwidth.

Steam needs to make it possible to download patch files rather than the whole file.

Basically the only thing CDPROJECT they have to do is extract this massive file and make this extracted version the base version in steam.
This is on CDProject not steam, all devs do this so the downloads are small. Maybe where steam competes with GOG they did it on purpose.

This is not a steam issue, its a dev issue.

There also another toooootally simple way to do patches for such big files. Handle them like a mod. Make a patch1.dzip which contains all modified files and overwrites the basic ones.

-> problem solved.

This happens to me on steam all the time, my portal 2 had to redownload multiple times, same goes for my left4dead 2, HL2, and CSS. As for non valve games I've had this happen to Serious Sam HD, Natural Selection 2, Saints Row 2, KIilling floor, Magicka, and many others. This is why I'm buying this game from gog, so I can do patches myself the right way.

Than it is possible that something's wrong with your steam or system, as I have every single on of those games and never encountered this problem with them. oO

Apart from one game, I have them all too and could say the same thing. I pretty much know what he means though. Pretty much all Valve games get regular updates to them, sometimes even weekly. On the downloads tab all you see is the game and its size, the top part however shows the actual downloaded amount, which it appears he failed to notice.

The Valve games get recent engine updates, but for me it is mostly not even 1mb of a download.

Steam never patched those games for you? What he is saying that Steam doesn't do patches, but instead they just replace any modified file. With the Witcher 2, it is a 9.2 GB file in the game that gets patched, so Steam does what it does for all games, it downloads to you the modified file, which in this case is a 9.2 GB file. Where as other version for this game it is a 9-16 mb patch file that modifies the 9 gb file.