The download stalls, crawls, or fails at the end

Three different faults that look the same

The progress bar gives you almost no information, so start by working out which of these you have.

Slow

The percentage is still moving, just not quickly. This is a network and server question, and restarting things makes it worse rather than better.

Stalled

The percentage has not moved at all for several minutes and the transfer speed reads zero. Usually a dropped connection, a sleeping machine, a full disk, or security software holding a file.

Damaged

The download completes and then reports corrupted, missing or mismatched files. Nearly always an interrupted transfer or a disk that filled up along the way.

When it is simply slow

Australian players are geographically distant from most game distribution infrastructure, and that distance is a fixed cost on every large transfer. Evening hours are also when household and network demand peaks. A download that runs at a fraction of your connection's rated speed at 8pm and much faster at 6am is behaving normally, not badly.

What actually helps, in order of how much difference it tends to make:

• Use Ethernet. A cable removes an entire category of variability. If running one across the house for a day is possible, it is the single most effective thing on this list.
• Download at an off-peak hour. Start it before bed and let it run overnight, with sleep disabled.
• Stop competing traffic. Other devices streaming video, cloud backups and system updates all take from the same pipe.
• Leave it alone. Pausing, resuming and restarting a slow-but-moving download throws away progress and re-establishes connections that were working.

If your connection consistently underperforms what you are paying for, that is a matter between you and your provider rather than a game problem. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes material on broadband performance and on what providers must represent accurately when they sell a service.

When it has genuinely stopped

1. Check free disk space, properly

   Look at the actual drive the game is installing to, not at the drive you assume it is using. A download needs room for the compressed files it is fetching and for the installed result, which can mean substantially more free space during installation than afterwards. A disk that fills mid-transfer produces error messages about corrupted or unwritable files, which sends people off diagnosing the wrong thing entirely.

2. Stop the computer sleeping

   Sleep and hibernation both drop network connections. On a laptop, check the settings that apply on battery as well as the ones that apply when plugged in, and confirm that closing the lid does not suspend the machine.

3. Pause and resume once

   A single pause and resume re-establishes the connection and often restarts a transfer that has lost its thread. Do it once. Repeatedly cycling it achieves nothing.

4. Restart the launcher, then the machine

   In that order, and only if pause and resume did not help. A well-behaved launcher resumes from where it stopped rather than starting again.

5. Look at security software

   Security software inspects new executable files, and occasionally holds or quarantines one from a large unfamiliar download. If a file disappears mid-install or the launcher reports that it cannot write to its own folder, check your security software's quarantine list and its recent activity log. Adding the game's installation folder as an exclusion is a reasonable, targeted step. Turning protection off entirely is not, and nothing on this page requires it.

6. Check the path the game is installing to

   Install to a straightforward folder on a local drive. Paths containing unusual characters, network locations, external drives that spin down, and folders synchronised to cloud storage all cause intermittent write failures that look like download faults.

When it finishes but reports damaged files

Almost every launcher has a verification or integrity check: it compares each installed file against what it should be and re-downloads only the mismatches. That is the correct response to a corrupted installation, and it is usually far quicker than a reinstall because most of the data is intact.

If verification repairs files and the same ones break again on the next run, the fault is more likely to be the storage device than the download. Repeated corruption in the same place, unexplained file loss elsewhere on the drive, and the machine becoming unresponsive during large writes are all reasons to check the drive's health before spending another evening on the game.

Time that looks like a download but is not

Two stages routinely get mistaken for a stalled transfer, and both are the computer working normally.

The first is unpacking. When the transfer reaches one hundred per cent, the launcher still has to write the installed game out to disk. On a mechanical hard drive that stage can take a long while with no visible network activity at all, which reads as a freeze. Watch disk activity rather than network activity before concluding that something has failed.

The second is the shader and cache build on first launch. The game compiles material for your specific graphics hardware the first time it runs, and again after some driver or game updates. It looks like a hang, sometimes for several minutes, and interrupting it only means it starts over next time. Give a first launch considerably more patience than a later one before you decide it has crashed — and if it has genuinely crashed, that belongs on the launch failures page.