When Baldur's Gate 3 came out, Steam's overall bandwidth consumption went from around 18 Tbps to 146 Tbps
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.
that's a lot of tablepoons
It's hard to get steam into tablespoons. I was really impressed.
Damn, The double whammy of jokes here got me good
That's only like 9 Cups of Bandwidth
Damn that's just over 1 and a half pints
A pint is 2 cups, so it's actually 4.5 pints!
Take your upvote and get out of here
And that was just one copy.
That's nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.
if one day it came out that node_modules were invented by western digital to sell more hard drives i wouldnt be surprised in the slightest
I need better glasses; my first read through I thought that was his nude_models directory and I wondered, exactly, where do you work?
That would make sense for this game.
Imagine the number of bad peer dependences
Jfc, what kind of website are they working on needing such an immense amount of different packages?
A contact form.
A hello world example page
Reddit 3rd party app, according to Reddit devs
Leftpad
"coworker"
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:
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
IIRC there is a website that does this with your library if you log in with steam. It just picks a random one from your library, and you may even be able to set filters or pick a specific collection.
https://thewheelhaus.com/
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
I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.
Steam has a 30% cut, so, that pays
Because they use Akamai as a CDN.
Crys in low internet speed
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
It's always amusing to me when a game has a huge download size but is also an overhead view game and you probably can't even get the camera close enough to the world objects to see the full texture detail.
Camera isn't stuck in isometric view. You can zoom, pan, tilt and see all the fantastic detail.
The original Dawn of War ruined isometric games for me since it allowed the pan and zoom, with mods allowing even more zooming in an out. BG3 having that ability has my interest peaked!
piqued*
Thanks, I wasn't sure it was right but also too lazy to check.
and too lazy to edit 😅 just joking around
I'm leaving it for future generations.
Also so your correction makes sense ;)
pooped*
Please, please don't take this as any insult or criticism, but for future reference, it's "piqued".
This particular homophone is almost as devious as "milquetoast". (Sounds like "milk toast")
Edit: someone beat me to it and now I feel like a jerk for piling on. Sorry!
An easy way to remember "milquetoast" is with context, here let me use it in a sentence:
"Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath is an Eccentric-class Offensive Unit."
See, didn't that clear it all up?
It's been about 5 or so years since I reread The Culture books. It might be time again.
I'm not the person you answered to, but as english ain't my first language I figured I'd ask:
I get that this person was trying to say "piqued" as in "got my interest"
But wouldn't "peaked" as in "my interest couldn't possibly get higher as it has peaked from that new information" also be valid?
(I get it's a saying, but as I'm not familiar with that saying in english it didn't bother me, which is why I'm curious)
piqued implies a mild interest worthy of further investigation.
peaked implies interest can't possibly get any higher, as though they were already super interested, but the ability to pan the camera eclipses all other interesting features.
Yeah it technically would get across a similar meaning. And at this point I see “peaked” more often online than the right one. But “piqued” is the idiom— not that it matters all that much.
For a long time I mixed up deprecated (meaning, no longer supported) with depreciated (meaning, having lost value over time) because they can both kinda apply to the same situations, if you tilt your head the right way.
The zoom out is very limited. I constantly wish it could zoom out more
The inability to zoom out is my dealbreaker for Diablo. The limitation doesn't feel immersive to me, it feels claustrophobic.
A lot of older games were bigger because of static assets. Riven (myst 2) was fucking huge because it was like 60,000 jpgs. It was on 5 discs. Later games running in a 3D engine just had texture files and small models, they were a lot smaller.
There’s that quake 2 clone that team did a while back that was only 92KB- it generated everything in memory on the fly. Krieger I think it was called?
riven was huge because it deserved the space.
I wouldn't say it's overhead. When you zoom a bit it's more like a third party view, except you can move the camera around.
Yeah looks similar to Divinity Original Sin 2. I installed a camera mod on that so I could get lower and closer, but that of course caused some weirdness in the skybox.
That was always my confusion about people buying skins in league of legends or dota. I can barely see them!
Not true, you definitely can with the right resolution. LoL wild rift especially is close enough (being mobile) you can absolutely make out the skins. They're usually flashy and noticable enough everyone can tell what it is, too. They often have special animations, auras, attacks look different, etc. Some have special voice lines.
Like, just as an example, if you're an actual walking tumor and play Teemo, but get the bumblebee skin, the little mushroom traps he leaves around become beehives.
Also remember League and DotA are big steaming games, and matches are repayable, so getting in with different camera angles on replay is very muxh a thing.
You can use the scroll wheel to zoom in pretty darn close! Closer than you probably ever need to.
You can actually zoom into a Mass Effect style over the shoulder camera position if you want.
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.
Not to be a crypto bro but this is the kind of thing that cryptocurrency could be really good for. I mean that or just credit for games because maybe giving people an easier way to money launder on steam isnt a good idea
Why would we need crypto for this at all?
Steam already has a “currency” they could reward customers in, they don’t need to make it something needlessly more technical for zero benefit.
I've seen a few projects like filecoin that encourage people contributing to a decentralised service through a crypto currency since it represents very little startup costs (you dont have to actually have any fiat or crypto to start a cryptocurrency) and gives users an incentive to join your project.
The responses to me are right, though. Steam already has ways to pay users for their contribution without using a cryptocurrency. It's not something I'm usually a fan of but I thought it was an interesting idea nonetheless
No, it really would not be. As every time someone tries to pretend cryptocurrency is good for something, what you describe is more easily, more readily and more reliable solved without cryptocurrency.
As you say, just getting Steam wallet credits or, if we want to go full better-than-the-crypto-way, fiat currency, would work much much better.
Fair!
I actually like cryptocurrency and think it has many good use cases, but this is not one of them. Crypto is designed for trustless, decentralized systems. Steam is centralized, so there's no need for that trustless economy.
If there were ever a similar library which was open source and run by the people, then potentially crypto would be viable for that system, but for Steam it's simply unnecessary.
Isnt that somewhat what filecoin was supposed to be used for
That's kinda what I was alluding to but couldn't remember the name, yeah.
didnt think of that
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/
They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.
I've often wondered if this works if you use a VPN or not?
Thank you and please not. I value my upload for myself. At best make it an opt-in!
It's typically a soft switch in the config for capable clients.
Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this
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.
Jokes on windows, my WiFi is just funky enough that transfers between devices on LAN run like dogshit so it gives up before it even starts!
...I really need to invest the time into finding & implementing a better network solution
Go with old 10BASE2 network topology. Nothing beats 1Mbps which might randomly stop working due to missing terminator somewhere in the network.
Do you have any source or article about this? I'd love to hear more about this.
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.
I'm pleasantly surprised how many people are playing this game. I figured that DnD although popular, was still kinda a niche. Yet this is topping Steam charts which is great to see. Hopefully it means more of this quality to come, there is obviously a big market for it.
I can't wait to get home and get stuck in!
You take a game series that has a reputation for being great (but not that many have actually played it). Then you add the D:OS fans to it. Give people four year to "pre-order". Have the DnD movie be a success a few months before (if we don't look at the Hollywood accounting). Then have the game release first in a 3 month chain of big game releases, right after a summer of game drought. And not be a buggy mess despite its complexity. By a developer studio who have wanted the DnD game license for a long time and very much want it to be their best.
Of course theres gonna be a lot of players then. But I don't think it will be easy to repeat in the future.
Yeah all very good points there. They stars have aligned well for them here, and they deserve all the success.
With how popular the Divinity Original Sin series is I would be surprised if the game wasn't as popular as it is. Larian knows how to make a fucking great crpg.
I still think it's impressive and unexpected though. Divinity never broke 100k players even which I assume is the second highest cRPG player count.
For a game to go over 5x bigger on Steam than any other game of its genre? Thats impressive.
Didn't know this stat was public. Cool
In that spike my download speed went from 80 to 2 Mbps, I tried right after with another game, got 80 again. Baldur's Gate really strained their network
Precisely why data caps for fixed-line broadband was an extremely ridiculous idea to begin with.
Anyone who has info about the environmental impact of something like this, compared to physical media? Not trying to be a downer, I'm genuinely curious.
As in DVDs or Blu Rays?
Computers running for hours just downloading, servers running hot to share the files, extra bandwidth in use - certainly not free.
But in contrast to producing optical media, burning data onto it, printing a cover, sticking it in a plastic box, sticking that plastic box in a larger box with polystyrene peanuts, putting that box with other boxes on a pallet, wrapping them in shrink wrap, flying them across the world, discarding the wrap, breaking down the pallet, driving individual boxes around a region, having an employee come to the store early by car to unload boxes, and have them put individual game cases on display on metal shelves and then lighting and air-conditioning said game cases for a few weeks until they're all sold to customers who drive to and from the store, and then run it on their local computer... Download has got to be more efficient. Certainly when most games then have an update to the disc version already required to download by the time the customer gets home.
The vast majority of the distance covered is using light as the transmission medium, so we can't really get much more efficient than that.
Just a note that commercially produced disks aren't burned they're pressed. I'm not sure which is better environmentally however.
This guy life cycle analysis
I don't think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that's the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.
The main argument in favor of downloading is, it's easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other "clean" sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.
I have no info on it. I can speculate, and I'm happy to be corrected!
There is no way that physical media is greener.
Just the sheer production of physical media would be more than the servers, never mind the transportation, space in shops, people traveling to pick it up.
And then, day 1 rolls around and there would still be updates.
10x bandwidth for an hour is nothing.
And I'd consider everything up to the trunk routes of the internet. Ultimate, internet trunks and consumers are going to have internet. A data center peering to the trunks isn't hugely power intensive, the networks are going to exist and the bandwidth is available, it's mostly a matter of cost. So, it's essentially steams datacenter impact.
Could probably estimate it.
If it's able to deliver 150tbps, and we assume steam is using 100gbps networking per server (ultimately, it's just file serving), that's 1500 servers.
Say a server is 1.5kw, that's 1.5kw of power and 1.5kw of heat. DC cooling is about 15%, so 1.77kw per server.
Or 2.7 MW for all 1500 servers.
Round that up to 3MW to account for backups, spares, switches etc.
So, let's assume that the BG3 download took 3MW for 1 hour.
And, I feel, this is an over estimate.
Trucks are 300-500kw. Let's take 300kw, best case.
A single DVD case (let's ignore that this game is on the edge of a 4-layer bluray, and say it's single disc) is 55 grams.
2.5m copies (the lowest sales estimate I've seen) would be 137,500 kilograms, or 137t.
A 44t artic truck can carry 24t of cargo (this depends on the actual truck and local regulations, of course).
So, moving 137t of discs requires 6 trucks.
6 X 300kw = 1.8 MW.
So, if it take more than 2 hours to truck these discs to get them to stores, then transportation is already over the DC power requirements.
Most of the distance covered by internet transmission is transmitted by light. It's as efficient as it gets.
I'm looking forward to the return of games so big they merit physical distribution. Like, the first terabyte game that comes on its own SSD - plug it into a spare M2 slot or a USB3 port and go.
You're not going to see it unfortunately. They'll just assume that you're on gigabit and will spend 3 hours downloading it.
In a Datacenter that I have some equipment in, it's $300 a month for 1gbps. At that cost, 3 hours of bandwidth costs them $1.20... this is cheaper than any current device that can hold 1TB by leaps and bounds. Forget that they'd have way bigger pipes than that and at a much better cost/gbps.
On top of that you can also program stuff to do distributed file serving (eg. bittorrent) to alleviate the datacenter costs too. So that $1.20 is a "worst case" scenario... and the costs plummet hard at each cost-cutting step they could take.
No more than any other release. This is just notable because it was all at once, which Steam is usually good about distributing, but this time it didn't work out and they took the traffic all at once.
Basically you'd see the same thing spread out over days with a usual steam release and the pre-loading that goes with it.
As for a physical release, I mean, I absolutely would if I could...
If it out out then? Nice. I'll wait for it to go on sale though. I'm poor AF.
You're welcome over at patient gamers!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !patientgamers@lemmy.ml
Not the right place to ask, or maybe to be seen. But I watched ACG's video on this and I LOVE the classes and how meat n potatoes they are. No guffy [what I call] Horde style shit like Necromancer or whatever.
I've only ever played DnD once IRL in a discord and some online board thing, but I enjoyed the dice rolling and how posistioning worked. Is it a bit of xcom meets diablo if I twisted your arm to compare to another game genre? A friend and I tried that Gloomhaven game and we HATED it lol, but this looks a little more engaging at least from a very first glance.
Plus a few friends have picked it up, so i'm not sure if I could join their game to help kinda like we did with D4 which was super fun.
XCOM meets Diablo is a decent enough way of putting it, as long as you don't expect the mechanics to be 1:1. Since you brought up positioning, there's no grid for movement, or flanking, for example. Battles are turn-based, like XCOM, but it's not split in player turn and AI turn, instead, each individual character/npc gets its own turn, with the order decided based on dice rolls and whatever modifiers are applicable.
It's quite different from both in the way that the skills can have position mechanics for some like backstab (rogue class, least I am pretty sure they can backstab), or persuade/intimidate to sway conversant to your objective, but still xcom related in the way that each character has a turn where they can do a variety of multiple things in a turn. Diablo is only similar in that it has skills but an extremely different paced game. Positioning is important for spells, unless I am misremembering, because AOE in DnD doesn't care who's in the area, so you don't want to cast fireball when your party members are within the area.
Turn actions are broken down into their own categories like action / quick action (*later edit, bonus action when reading abilities/spells) which each has their own amount of (though usually a similar amount but after some levels some classes can hit/attack multiple times, this is needed for martial classes). The combat is turn related once started but you can often get characters into positions before starting combat (this may need stealth for some because once certain enemies see you they start combat). There is a bigger emphasis on role playing (conversation) choices in the game that can impact encounters, either with the current conversant or down the line. Certain actions like getting caught stealing will impact things too CRPGs are their own genre, have more in common with other Larian games (divinity original sin) or games like Pathfinder, and of course the older DnD games. The rules takes some knowledge and getting used to but not overly difficult, you can download a free edition of the DnD 5th editions rules which may help too(not 100% accurate but close enough). If you have friends I think you'll enjoy playing with them as you figure out your strategies from battle to conversations but it's a slower paced game. Just don't ignore things that can boost out of combat abilities to persuade (skill) or stealth that can give other opportunities while playing, though you can probably just play a murder everyone party if it works for you.
If you enjoy a quicker paced game though this isn't your game is all, it's slow and there can be a lot of time spent checking chests, talking and wandering. If you enjoy story and some tactical combat this is a good choice in my opinion.
Edit: forgot to add, party composition (classes) makes a big difference,you probably don't want a group of 4 of one class as each class has it's niche, but doesn't mean it's undoable may just be more difficult.
Later edit: I said quick action, but it's a actually bonus action, helpful for when reading the text, hopefully nobody was confused.
Isn't this basically the same with every bigger release?
Normally pre-loading helps to even the load. For automatic updates, Steam strategically distributes them to even the load.
There wasn't a a pre-load for BG3 though, really. It was incompatible with their EA release.
Yes, hence the unusual spike in this case
I misinterpreted your original comment. We agree, haha.
And they had to make a bunch of posts and updates begging people to delete all saves and even completely uninstall the game. Hell, weeks ago they were flat out telling people not to even play it at all.
Which is all so silly. I really hope Valve took notice of all this, since it's such a huge release. They could definitely do with some improvements to this whole EA -> full release. Even as simple as having an option for two downloads (old EA version you can play now OR prerelease full version you cannot play until x time on y date).
So that's why my download took 15 hours.
I absolutely contributed to that and bought it day one.
And here's me, getting it on GOG where it's DRM free.
This game is gonna be on one of my USB sticks for yeeeeears.
Steam version is still technically DRM free, just don't have Steam running when you run the executable.
Yeah most games on Steam run just fine without Steam. You can shortcut the exe if you want to.
You can also install it to any drive/USB you want to and use it from there for years, with or without Steam.
GoG is great, don't get me wrong. But the things OP is celebrating it for have been doable on Steam for a very long time now.
Time to buy a 256GB stick for it lol
Yeah you can get some nippy ones these days, faster than an HDD so arguably suitable to run off of. Only thing I've noticed is that fast USB sticks can saturate a pair of ports on a lot of devices - if you have, say, a mouse in the other port then the movement might get stuttery when transferring at full pace.
I did my part!
At what point does it becomes cheaper to ship it to the buyer on a thumb drive?
Probably at no point ever again. Bandwidth is so cheap these days that producing and shipping anything is always going to be more expensive.
Tell that to the CRTC.
Some backup services charge less for shipping a hard drive then bandwidth, last I looked it was around 8tb to be cheaper (for the user) then restoring over the internet. So I'd guess it's around that mark, but I'm obviously not an expert.
My experience shipping things for large companies tells me that FedEx Express with volume discounts costs about $7-12 and you can buy a lot of terrabits of bandwidth for that much money.
However the idea of a branded thumb drive for every game sounds absolutely wicked and I'm now sad that isn't the reality we live in
When I tried to start downloading it yesterday morning the steam content servers were failing. I can't recall that happening before.
Or carrier pigeon for that matter
2.25 Terabytes per second for regular use? Thats actually not that bad considering its the entirety of steam. I kind of want to see those numbers for youtube.
I have a friend who worked at a rural ISP serving communities with only a couple hundred residents each. He told me they have a 10Gbit backbone with failover and some customers on gigabit connections, but most are served over DSL/Cable. So 10Gbit x2 over-provisioned maybe 10-20x? I just found those hard numbers for how an ISP is setup very interesting
Is the game worth it
Very much worth it. IMO Larian managed to outdone Original Sin 2 in regards of the RP aspect. As for the mechanics, I still prefer the Pathfinder CRPG games because it's much more expansive system and one of the best TTRPG system implementation in a video game.
If only pathfinder was split screen coop..
If you are into old-school story-driven turn-based RPGs you will thoroughly enjoy yourself. If you want something fast paced this game is not for you.
I’d rather have friends to play it with, that would sound fun to me
I even had the download cancel midway through. I honestly can't remember personally experiencing a game release that brought their servers to its knees. They should've really done at least a day of preload time though, that would've saved a lot of trouble.
Using torrents would be relevant
Why couldn't it be preloaded?
Because it would disrupt being able to continue playing early access right upto release, I remember reading in a tweet
Personally, I would have opted for just stopping early access to preload but people have gotten angry over stupider stuff before, I guess
I mean there is no perfect option there really, you're gonna piss people off either way. I would say though locking people from playing a full price AAA game they paid for is probably more controversial than not being able to provide a preload.
Is this the highest it's ever been? Pretty nuts.
I'd be curious to know that too but I can't find any info on it. I mean it must surely be a contender because other huge releases typically have preload.
Mineis still downloading at about 600kb per second so it will be a while. I got pathfinder kingmaker super cheap so playing that for a bit.
And I helped!!!
And still only 0.1% of players have 'Descent from Avernus'
Are you even playing the game?
Lots of people are probably waiting until the weekend
Exactly my case, downloaded yesterday so I can play all weekend. Don't have but an hour to play during the work week. Definitely not starting this game with just an hour.
Get your character created in that hour so you can just jump in later!
Keep in mind that the game has been in Early Access for almost three years. Anybody who played the game in that span but hasn't launched it since yesterday is going to push that percentage down.
i think thats a display bug. if i hover over my own "descent from avernus" it also shows me .1%, however if i hover over one of my coop partners it shows as 40%
41.2% have it.
I will buy it later this year when I upgrade my PC.
It runs great on my aging hardware (1070 Ti) thanks to AMDs FSR. Unfortunately it's only FSR 1.0 which Deos make the game a little blurry, but 80-100fps in Balanced is better than having 40fps.
There's no reason this game should be this large, it's ridiculous.
There is a lot in the game gotta admit
i think it's ok
There is an obscene amount of content. The voice acting alone would take up an exceptional amount of space when you consider how many choices for pretty much every character/animal/whatever else there are.
sadly, there are already better games than BG3. im not super keen on BG3 at all.
Sadly? You should be happy that there are already better games, and go play them!
Socially acceptable T&A, same reason everybody was into The Witcher; with BG3 you can even tell your parents / girlfriend / whatever that it's a sequel to a beloved game you remember from your childhood.
Every once in a while I stumble upon a comment online that inadvertently reveals a lot about the person who made the comment.
Lemmy has bizarrely high number of commenters that I can only describe as "Ken M, but sincere and angry".
Oh man I forgot about Ken.
Married to a wife who has no problem with watching actual porn, but thanks for playing
You made two in a row! Impressive.
Sick burn, enjoy your elf-infused masturbation dude
C'mon, be serious my dude; githyanki > elf
Can't get much hotter than Karlach tbh
She has no problem with actual porn but you'll need to find an excuse/get permission to play BG3?
Doesn't seem like a healthy relationship dude
My friend there's a lot of porn. And if you like the interactivity, there's a lot of good porn games now. Check itch.io. The few seconds of titillation is not why most people are playing these games.
Preorders exploded after news came out about bear sex.
Yeah because it's funny and got people talking about the game
Really though, I wish nudity and sexuality wasn't such a big taboo thing in society. So what if people get horny by the game, is that a bad thing?
It probably is, ya
But why?
bruh