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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.
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.