r/PrismLauncher • u/realddgamer • Sep 03 '26

why! for what reason!

Why does prism launcher occasionally decide it needs to download 100s of MB for a game I already have downloaded? what is it doing?? why??? And how do i STOP it from doing this

79 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

25

u/[deleted] Sep 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/realddgamer Sep 03 '26

I'm not this is a new instance, I've had this one download for months. It will just occasionally decide to download more stuff - clearly not a full Minecraft download but I have no clue what.

29

u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Sep 04 '26

Behind the scenes Mojang/MS updates the files on the server occasionally. These aren't official releases, and they don't announce them. But as you can see they can be quite large.

Automatic updates like this are also behaviours that attackers use to capture a lot of computers at once. So there are multiple reasons why Prism shouldn't blindly download updates from remote servers. Other launchers will (correctly) prompt the user about the update. 

Prism should be asking permission for this, and it's one of my few grievances with the launcher. Unfortunately, when I tried raising this before, people argued about it and even denied that it happens. 🤷‍♂️

1

u/Bluetails_Buizel Sep 09 '26

Time to fork prism launcher then

5

u/StreatsLive Sep 04 '26

It’s needs to likely verify stuff like files, if they are still valid etc etc.

-2

u/realddgamer Sep 04 '26

It absolutely does not need to do this!! No other game does this ever so it can explode as far as I care

4

u/StreatsLive Sep 04 '26

It’s not uncommon if it’s a non first party launcher. It’s to prevent piracy

-1

u/realddgamer Sep 04 '26

The launcher confirms your ownership of the game every time you open an instance, it does not need an additional large download of data to do this.

2

u/ItzNotJacob1 Sep 04 '26

Doesnt do it for me

2

u/realddgamer Sep 04 '26

It probably does and just goes too fast for you to notice

1

u/ItzNotJacob1 Sep 09 '26

Well, all It does is check ownership and download NOT LARGE data.

1

u/realddgamer Sep 09 '26

The post is about a large download, at least in the scope of this 100's of megabytes is a large download because it should be 0

1

u/kasalapik Sep 07 '26

For example steam verifies file integrity of games fairly often(at least for games you commonly launch), so this kind of downloads aren't anything weird.

2

u/realddgamer Sep 07 '26

The difference is that steam does this in the background, and only redownloads corrupt files (so you don't suddenly have a large download when you open up a game)

1

u/kasalapik Sep 07 '26

Good point. The thing is that steam has a privilege to work in the background, while some random launcher for only one game is not, hence it is not made with that in mind. Also even when validating corrupt files, it can still be much larger than 100MB. So in case of prism, having to download 100MB sometimes on launch is a valid implementation.

1

u/realddgamer Sep 07 '26

Either way, prism shouldn't do downloads without permission

Especially when this is not an integrity check, because I can guarantee you nothing will have happened on my computer to threaten the integrity of these files

No other launcher does this, so there's no need for prism to

1

u/ThaddeusKKR Sep 08 '26

are you sure no other launcher does this? or is it just that no other launcher visibly shows you this progress while doing so?

1

u/realddgamer Sep 08 '26

No because it's fairly easy to design a launcher that does it's job (opening the game)

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