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.
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
Precisely why data caps for fixed-line broadband was an extremely ridiculous idea to begin with.
There’s no reason this game should be this large, it’s ridiculous.
I absolutely contributed to that and bought it day one.
So that’s why my download took 15 hours.
