From Steam’s self-published stats.
Baldur’s Gate 3 could not be preloaded and weighed in at 125 gigabytes on disk, so when the game left Early Access at 11am US Eastern yesterday, Steam’s bandwidth utilization shot up 8x over a span of 30 minutes. I know personally, I saw my download hit over 600 Mbps across a 1 Gbps fiber connection.
Kudos to the system engineers at Valve. It is mind-boggling that they have built infrastructure that robust.
Steam would profit from integrating something like the bittorrent protocol for downloads imo
While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D
It could be opt-in with rewards for toggling it on.
didnt think of that
They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.
Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this
Do you have any source or article about this? I’d love to hear more about this.
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Microsoft’s implementation of the feature is called Windows Update Delivery Optimization.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-delivery-optimization-and-privacy-bf86a244-8f26-a3c7-a137-a43bfbe688e8
Here’s a short optimisation guide: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-delivery-optimization.html
Fundamentally it’s not like the Bittorrent protocol, even though there are similar behaviours and the result is the same. Microsoft retains the ability to stop the network from seeding updates and has ways of only targeting specific supported configurations to receive new updates.
And on Windows it’s so poorly implemented they had to reserve 20% of bandwidth for updates being uploaded and downloaded and you don’t get a choice on that. So when Windows is sharing its updates your internet access suffers.
it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.
Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/