Question about retail version of GTA V on PC.

I want to get GTA V for PC and I would love to get the Steam version but the trouble is I only get 80 gigs per month from my internet provider and eating up 65 of those gigs on one game is kinda dangerous as I would have to pay $2 for every gig I go over for the month...thanks a lot Rogers.

Anyways that leaves the retail boxed set and all it's 7 discs of glory my only real option...so here are my questions.

Once I load up all the discs onto my hard drive do I still need to keep a disc in the drive like you do on the 360 as kind of a authentication or proof of purchase? And second, does the disc constantly spin in the optical drive while I play, or, again, is it like the 360 where it spins to authenticate and then it stops while you play?

Oh and one more, do updates for said game come straight from the R* social club website or do I have to go hunting for them?

I know some of those are weird questions (I plan on playing this game for hrs and hrs and I would like to save wear and tear and my optical drive)

Thanks guys.

I don't know about the discs, but the updates come from the social club client. The steam version updates through steam even though the client has to be running with the game, but it makes things a little easier.

Also, I'm pretty sure that even with disc authentication it doesn't constantly read. It's just checking the disc is there. Though since it uses the rockstar client it might just register the game's serial code to your social club account, binding them forever. FOREVER.

I'm pretty sure it's like every other PC game for the past seven or so years and you just install the game, put in the key, and put away the discs forever.

If I'm not mistaken, the physical version still requires you to download a few gigabytes of data.

EDIT: Also, to clear up some confusion, the digital download is a little more than 59 GBs on Steam. It is not 65. I don't know where the number 65 comes from (maybe install size?).

Not that having almost 21GBs for the rest of the month is much better than having 15, really, but it's worth pointing out.

EDIT 2: Install size is 60.6. So the full game, unpacked, isn't even 65. Why even bother implementing any sort of compression, Rockstar?

Thanks guys.

Believer you've given me something to think about. I could wait till the beginning of the month and buy GTA and try to keep my girls off the videos and save usage that way...I wonder if I could start the download in April, download 20 gigs or so, suspend it while my monthly plan kicks over to May and download the remaining 40 gigs?...wonder if that would work?

@rodent: if you know someone with the PC version on steam you could just copy their files on to a portable drive and steam will make it work without having to download the whole thing. I do it all the time.

Sadly very few people I know are gamers...even less are on PC.
Currently I'm looking to see what Rogers (my ISP) has for internet packages. Last time I did it I found out that they had discontinued the package I was paying for and were offering a newer package for the same monthly fee I was paying and it came with 20 extra gigs per month.

Dicks.

You say you are with Rogers, are you in Ontario?

If so there are plenty of other 3rd party ISP's that charge less and give you more bang for the buck.. and they all use the Rogers network anyways.

Yes Ontario.

My wife and I are going back and forth about "cutting the cable" and looking into cheap options. What Rogers gets from us, $-wise, monthly is ridiculous.

Honestly, I would.

I haven't given a penny of my money to Rogers in over a year, my bill is way cheaper now than it ever was, and I get a better product with better customer service.

Rogers are just crooks.

You with a bunch of different companies for phone, internet and tv? Or just one?

Right now I am with a company called Vmedia for internet and TV, I don't have a home phone.

http://www.vmedia.ca/

That is their website if you are interested, but there are other perfectly viable options out there as well.

That's what I was going to suggest. When I had a download limit, I'd plan for bigger downloads to stretch across the two months. Worked for me. Real pain in the ass having to worry about it at all, though. So glad I switched.

Thanks Huey, I'll give it a look.

Pcorb, does stretching the download really work? Could I actually suspend the d/load while my next months plan kicks in?

Stretching it would work fine but if I were you I'd time it with your billing cycles so it's only paused for 1-2 days, who knows what kind of fuckery may commence if there are title updates while paused.

Yes, this would work. I used to do this many years ago when I had a tight download cap. You can just let the download run until it has used as much bandwidth as you wish, then pause it in Steam. Once your next month's bandwidth allotment has begun, you can resume the download. You could even repeat this process to spread the download over 3 months or more if you really had to.

One thing to be aware of is that Steam will auto-resume the download whenever you restart Steam. There are two ways to stop this: either always remember to manually re-pause the download as soon as you boot up Steam, or go into the Steam download settings and set Steam to only update between certain hours when you know your computer will be off (e.g. 3 a.m. to 4 a.m.), which effectively turns off Steam's automatic downloading entirely. If you use the scheduling setting, you can still manually initiate a download at any time, yourself.

The moral of this story is... ditch Rogers and support 3rd party ISPs.

I'm with TekSavvy in Ontario and they've been great. I've got 400GB a month with unlimited downloads between 2AM and 8AM which has been perfect for me.

Vmedia, linked to earlier, looks good too; especially if you need TV.

@chrjz: Does that mean downloads between 0200 and 0800 don't count towards your bandwidth cap? If so, that seems like a pretty decent way to handle it.

Does your data get counted immediately or is there a delay? For me in aus there's a 12 hour delay of data being counted so for that 12 hours on the last day I basically get "unlimited."

@rodent: Check out Rogers' new ignite plans. You can get a 100/10 line with unlimited bandwidth for $85/month. If you're cord cutting the extra speed might be helpful. I'm currently on the 250/20 plan and regularly get up around 300mbps down.

EDIT: I was also with Vmedia up until March. I had some stability issues and the modem they give you is terrible. My local network sped up a lot after not being tied down to their modem/router.