This is a development I've talked about some time ago, but this is a development that's gone too far. So now, I use my bully pulpit in gaming to talk about one game in particular, Ark: Survival Evolved. I deleted this game from my Xbox One recently for one very good reason: the constant demand for update.

I've talked about patches before here, and the ever-increasing amount of space games are taking on our hard drives. Ark: Survival Evolved was one of the worst offenders, demanding frequent, multi-gig updates that didn't exactly bring a lot of extra power to the game.

Recently, I woke up to the frantically-flashing lights of my router, and knew that the Xbox One was in mid-download, but of what? A quick check revealed that it was Ark: Survival Evolved demanding an update. An update measuring a hefty 18 gigabytes.

18 gigabytes. That was just the update. I've seen entire games that don't measure half that, and these are triple-A game titles with dozens of hours of gameplay. And this was not the first such clog to my pipes that Ark had demanded, either.

Weighed all together, one thing became clear: this game was no longer worth my dwindling hard drive space or my bandwidth. And so, Ark: Survival Evolved, for your constant demands and minimal returns, I have had it with you.

While I understand that games require patches and updates, and even appreciate this fact in some cases, I maintain that some such updates are largely unnecessary. The constant demands staged by games like Ark--which, oddly, has been about the only time I've seen such demands take place--are simply excessive. Either better planning at the outset was needed, or some kind of warning was in order that this kind of thing was only going to carry on.

Regardless of the plan, regardless of the reason, one thing was clear enough: multi-gig patches are not a good thing, and Ark: Survival Evolved abused a privilege like no tomorrow, sufficient to get me to throw it out of my Xbox One lineup altogether.