Despite the convenience, these downloads pose substantial risks:

: Non-essential data, such as multi-language support files or high-resolution textures, may be stripped to shave off gigabytes. 3. The User Incentive

: Audio files and cinematic cutscenes are often re-encoded at lower bitrates or removed entirely (referred to as "rips").

To achieve a "highly compressed" state (often reducing 20 GB down to 5–10 GB), several technical compromises are made: