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 that was just one copy.
That’s nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.
node_modules directory
I need better glasses; my first read through I thought that was his nude_models directory and I wondered, exactly, where do you work?
Jfc, what kind of website are they working on needing such an immense amount of different packages?
A contact form.
A hello world example page
Leftpad
“coworker”
And it still gave me 800Mbps consistently right at launch time. Good servers.
I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.
Steam has a 30% cut, so, that pays
Isn’t Steam download peer to peer additionally from their servers?
Only on the local network.
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.
it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.
Thank you and please not. I value my upload for myself. At best make it an opt-in!
Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/
Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this
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?
I’m pleasantly surprised how many people are playing this game. I figured that DnD although popular, was still kinda a niche. Yet this is topping Steam charts which is great to see. Hopefully it means more of this quality to come, there is obviously a big market for it.
I can’t wait to get home and get stuck in!
You take a game series that has a reputation for being great (but not that many have actually played it). Then you add the D:OS fans to it. Give people four year to “pre-order”. Have the DnD movie be a success a few months before (if we don’t look at the Hollywood accounting). Then have the game release first in a 3 month chain of big game releases, right after a summer of game drought. And not be a buggy mess despite its complexity. By a developer studio who have wanted the DnD game license for a long time and very much want it to be their best.
Of course theres gonna be a lot of players then. But I don’t think it will be easy to repeat in the future.
With how popular the Divinity Original Sin series is I would be surprised if the game wasn’t as popular as it is. Larian knows how to make a fucking great crpg.
Precisely why data caps for fixed-line broadband was an extremely ridiculous idea to begin with.
In that spike my download speed went from 80 to 2 Mbps, I tried right after with another game, got 80 again. Baldur’s Gate really strained their network
So that’s why my download took 15 hours.
Didn’t know this stat was public. Cool
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.
Anyone who has info about the environmental impact of something like this, compared to physical media? Not trying to be a downer, I’m genuinely curious.
As in DVDs or Blu Rays?
Computers running for hours just downloading, servers running hot to share the files, extra bandwidth in use - certainly not free.
But in contrast to producing optical media, burning data onto it, printing a cover, sticking it in a plastic box, sticking that plastic box in a larger box with polystyrene peanuts, putting that box with other boxes on a pallet, wrapping them in shrink wrap, flying them across the world, discarding the wrap, breaking down the pallet, driving individual boxes around a region, having an employee come to the store early by car to unload boxes, and have them put individual game cases on display on metal shelves and then lighting and air-conditioning said game cases for a few weeks until they’re all sold to customers who drive to and from the store, and then run it on their local computer… Download has got to be more efficient. Certainly when most games then have an update to the disc version already required to download by the time the customer gets home.
Just a note that commercially produced disks aren’t burned they’re pressed. I’m not sure which is better environmentally however.
I have no info on it. I can speculate, and I’m happy to be corrected!
There is no way that physical media is greener.
Just the sheer production of physical media would be more than the servers, never mind the transportation, space in shops, people traveling to pick it up.
And then, day 1 rolls around and there would still be updates.
10x bandwidth for an hour is nothing.And I’d consider everything up to the trunk routes of the internet. Ultimate, internet trunks and consumers are going to have internet. A data center peering to the trunks isn’t hugely power intensive, the networks are going to exist and the bandwidth is available, it’s mostly a matter of cost. So, it’s essentially steams datacenter impact.
Could probably estimate it.
If it’s able to deliver 150tbps, and we assume steam is using 100gbps networking per server (ultimately, it’s just file serving), that’s 1500 servers.
Say a server is 1.5kw, that’s 1.5kw of power and 1.5kw of heat. DC cooling is about 15%, so 1.77kw per server.
Or 2.7 MW for all 1500 servers.
Round that up to 3MW to account for backups, spares, switches etc.
So, let’s assume that the BG3 download took 3MW for 1 hour.
And, I feel, this is an over estimate.Trucks are 300-500kw. Let’s take 300kw, best case.
A single DVD case (let’s ignore that this game is on the edge of a 4-layer bluray, and say it’s single disc) is 55 grams.
2.5m copies (the lowest sales estimate I’ve seen) would be 137,500 kilograms, or 137t.
A 44t artic truck can carry 24t of cargo (this depends on the actual truck and local regulations, of course).
So, moving 137t of discs requires 6 trucks.
6 X 300kw = 1.8 MW.
So, if it take more than 2 hours to truck these discs to get them to stores, then transportation is already over the DC power requirements.I don’t think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that’s the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.
The main argument in favor of downloading is, it’s easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other “clean” sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.
Is this the highest it’s ever been? Pretty nuts.
I’d be curious to know that too but I can’t find any info on it. I mean it must surely be a contender because other huge releases typically have preload.
Why couldn’t it be preloaded?
Is the game worth it
If you are into old-school story-driven turn-based RPGs you will thoroughly enjoy yourself. If you want something fast paced this game is not for you.
I’d rather have friends to play it with, that would sound fun to me
Isn’t this basically the same with every bigger release?
I even had the download cancel midway through. I honestly can’t remember personally experiencing a game release that brought their servers to its knees. They should’ve really done at least a day of preload time though, that would’ve saved a lot of trouble.