Yeah thats bollox , sorry but no game has 50 gb files on launch , and what kind of idiotic company would send round a file they weren't using in launch code base ?
TLDR; Internal workflows, not customer facing. Enterprise dropbox.
The article title is misleading. They are actually talking about the internal workflow.
Raw assets, art assets, and such, can be pretty large.
When you have a studio in Country A doing PC, a studio in country B doing ps3, all wanting the base raw data but (presumably) transforming it in different ways, between how the build actually happens or artists tweaking something for a platform, it'd become a nightmare pretty quickly if you were to send it across a company private network (often just VPN pipes across the internet itself).
The article is, at it's heart, an ad for a company called 'Panzura', which sounds like an enterprise-specific dropbox. Boxes 'on-premise', security guarantees, and probably pretty expensive.
I'm aware of at least one PS3 game port that had around 40GB of data at launch. I'd be surprised if that were the only one.
Most games' source data is much larger than the shipped data size for a number of reasons, mostly because files designed for human editing encode a lot of information not needed by the game itself, and game source data is aggressively compressed making it unsuitable for further editing. A full snapshot of the source data for a game like Battlefield 4 is likely to be on the order of hundreds of GB, maybe getting up to the TB range. And if multiple teams are working on the same source data, then the source data needs to be sent between them.
Also, before the final few months of development, games' runtime data will often significantly exceed the final shipped size because compression and quality tradeoffs have not been decided and applied.
