When Baldur's Gate 3 came out, Steam's overall bandwidth consumption went from around 18 Tbps to 146 Tbps

scops@reddthat.com to Games@lemmy.world – 1446 points –

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.

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And it still gave me 800Mbps consistently right at launch time. Good servers.

Steam has some of the most consistent and high quality servers around. It's quite rare to see them slow down or go down, at least in my experience.

I can't think of a time steam was down (for me personally, I know outages happen) that wasn't planned and announced well ahead of time

And I've got a lot of hours on steam

What, you just play "Steam"? :)

Yeah, it's got a very satisfying game loop:

  • open library
  • browse my 800+ games
  • realise this is how women feel when they look at their packed closets and say "i have nothing to wear"
  • close steam
  • wait a bit
  • open steam
  • repeat

I always wanted to start a let's play channel where a just play a random game from my libraryb every time. I have so many I never even touched

And at best only during specific sales like the Steam deck their servers became unresponsive for a bit.

so high quality that they go down for maintenance every Tuesday..

That seems pretty normal if you want your servers to stay high quality?

normal? not at all. Imagine if youtube went down every week, and they have way more overhead than steam

Because they use Akamai as a CDN.

Isn't Steam download peer to peer additionally from their servers?

Only on the local network.

Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. Is this automatic, or does it need to be configured somehow?

automatic for me. as long as u have 2 pc's with steam open on the same network, it'll do a local transfer