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Valve tweaking Steam to boost download speeds

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DVDBack23 @ Jul 19, 2011 17:47 | 5 comments

Valve has announced this week that it will be tweaking its Steam digital distribution platform in order to boost the speed of game downloads.

Currently, new releases and major sales will cause Steam to slow down significantly, due to the spike in traffic.

The new tweaks will add a larger bandwidth threshold and "Steam will be able to serve content from more locations to reach international users better, and all content will be sent via HTTP."

Furthermore, Steam will be tweaked so users do not have to download as much data. When an update is passed, you will only have to download the modified bits, not the full update.

Finally, the company says "users can also expect new client features, such as download scheduling and priorities, bandwidth throttling, and the ability to update a game while playing."

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Comments

Comment by: hearme0 (Jul 19, 2011 18:54)

I really do like Steam/Valve. Love their prices and convenience...........HATE the fact that you can't resell games that were purchased on a PHYSICAL medium and activated by Steam.

Comment by: ROMaster2 (Jul 19, 2011 23:24)

Originally posted by hearme0:
I really do like Steam/Valve. Love their prices and convenience...........HATE the fact that you can't resell games that were purchased on a PHYSICAL medium and activated by Steam.

It's a business, and it's profitable.

Comment by: oappi (Jul 20, 2011 16:14)

yeah thats the trade off, but you get backup service which imho is more valuable. i haven't sold any of my old games, and before steam i had a lot of difficulties with making backup copies of my games. Sometimes i tried to make one whole day and still wasn't able to get it working because of the drm. So steam is perfect for me, but that might not be the case with everyone.

If i was the one deciding i would build torrent like downloading distribution for steam. Of course it can't be exactly same, but the transferring principle would be same. For example some extra security layers might have to be designed . First they should just make their own servers as seeders. So that people wont have to search for the best server. That way they could balance localized spikes a little since it is very likely that people in Australia won't use nearly as much bandwidth at the same time as people in US. After that is up and running i would allow users with enough free storage space to seed files to others and offer them bit less as steam credit than what they would pay for that capacity.

Comment by: DXR88 (Jul 20, 2011 22:10)

Steam is relatively easy to crack making the game standalone even easier is the ability to find steam emulators(i always try to avoid those). it offers less restriction than your D2D downloads and doesn't DRM the .EXE files so you can use mods with steam games.

over all if i had to chose an internet download space to acquire my games it would be steam.

I've never had issues with the downloading speed of steam if anything it always capped out my 25/5 plan.

Comment by: oappi (Jul 21, 2011 10:43)

Originally posted by DXR88:

I've never had issues with the downloading speed of steam if anything it always capped out my 25/5 plan.

You have been lucky or you didn't download game when they had sale. This years summer sale was actually first sale period i was able to get decent download speeds with out changing server. Even if they managed to buy more capacity i still feel that economically it should be more efficient if they could get users to upload data and if users were paid with non-refundable steam credit it would probably be less attractive to crackers etc who might want to abuse this new distribution method.