To put it mildly, the PC release of Mortal Kombat X seems to be a bit of a clusterfuck. I "preloaded" the game last night and was surprised to see that it was only a bit over 3GB in size. "Huh, that's weird," I thought. I shrugged it off and instead proceeded to play the PC release of Grand Theft Auto V instead.

Now, despite there being a few minor issues (unless you had certain 9xx series Nvidia cards), the PC launch of GTAV went really, really smoothly. This is especially in comparison to whatever the hell is going on with the Mortal Kombat X launch.

See, someone either at NetherRealm, WBIE, or High voltage Software (the studio that handled the "port" of the game to the PC), decided it would be an amazing idea to test out a new streaming service on Steam. Yes, let's test out an unproven technology on a AAA game release. Even better, let's test out a streaming service on the same night that GTAV, an absolute beast of a game as far as download size is concerned, is launching on the same distribution platform.

Brilliant. Absolutely, 100% brilliant.

Sadly, things didn't really seem to work out in Mortal Kombat's favor. Most every owner of the PC version of the game complained about being unable to get past even the main menu after launching it. It seems as though the streaming service wasn't actually doing much. On top of that, once the streaming service did start to work, it led to more issues. Sometimes all of the fighters would be downloaded in one chunk, but all of the stages were still not on your system yet because they were in a chunk that wouldn't be downloaded for quite some time! Whooo, good times!

The PlayStation 4 (and I think the Xbox One) has a system similar to this. However, unlike this solution on Steam, it actually kind of works on the PS4. You can at least play a small opening portion of a game as it downloads and installs the rest to your hard drive. I wouldn't exactly call staring at Mortal Kombat X's main menu actually "playing" the game.

I was fortunate enough not to try playing last night. Today, I tried to launch only the configuration tool for the game. What does it do? It starts to download a number of updates of various sizes.

I started these downloads at about 11:40AM. It's now 12:30PM and the updates are still downloading. A total of 10.7GB has been downloaded already. Now again, the "preload" was only a bit over 3GB in size. That is to say, the main menu was about a 3GB download. It's great that all of the game's chunks are actually listed as "DLC" for the game for some inexplicable reason.


To think that all of this could have been avoided if the preload actually downloaded the game. What's the point of even having a preload phase if you're simply going to abuse it with an unproven system. I could understand using a streaming service on fresh purchases after the game is out but to use them on preloads is absolutely insane. Oh, and maybe don't test drive an unproven system on a AAA release next time.