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