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