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.

  • SpermGoobler@lemmy.blueEnglish
    412·
    1 year ago

    While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1038·
        1 year ago

        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

        • Quokka@quokk.auEnglish
          28·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            1 year ago

            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

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • Sigh_Bafanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.