this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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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.

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[–] feedum_sneedson 150 points 1 year ago (3 children)

that's a lot of tablepoons

[–] morgan_423 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's hard to get steam into tablespoons. I was really impressed.

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[–] PMmesexypajamas 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's only like 9 Cups of Bandwidth

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And that was just one copy.

[–] TheFriendlyArtificer 51 points 1 year ago (10 children)

That's nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.

[–] merthyr1831 18 points 1 year ago

if one day it came out that node_modules were invented by western digital to sell more hard drives i wouldnt be surprised in the slightest

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (8 children)

And it still gave me 800Mbps consistently right at launch time. Good servers.

[–] ItsMeSpez 35 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] tpyo 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.

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[–] dan1101 55 points 1 year ago (7 children)

It's always amusing to me when a game has a huge download size but is also an overhead view game and you probably can't even get the camera close enough to the world objects to see the full texture detail.

[–] iforgotmyinstance 81 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Camera isn't stuck in isometric view. You can zoom, pan, tilt and see all the fantastic detail.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The original Dawn of War ruined isometric games for me since it allowed the pan and zoom, with mods allowing even more zooming in an out. BG3 having that ability has my interest peaked!

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] joe 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Please, please don't take this as any insult or criticism, but for future reference, it's "piqued".

This particular homophone is almost as devious as "milquetoast". (Sounds like "milk toast")

Edit: someone beat me to it and now I feel like a jerk for piling on. Sorry!

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[–] carl_dungeon 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A lot of older games were bigger because of static assets. Riven (myst 2) was fucking huge because it was like 60,000 jpgs. It was on 5 discs. Later games running in a 3D engine just had texture files and small models, they were a lot smaller.

There’s that quake 2 clone that team did a while back that was only 92KB- it generated everything in memory on the fly. Krieger I think it was called?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wouldn't say it's overhead. When you zoom a bit it's more like a third party view, except you can move the camera around.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Steam would profit from integrating something like the bittorrent protocol for downloads imo

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It could be opt-in with rewards for toggling it on.

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[–] mates1500 36 points 1 year ago

it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.

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[–] o_oli 37 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

Didn't know this stat was public. Cool

[–] vermingot 23 points 1 year ago

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

[–] fne8w2ah 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Precisely why data caps for fixed-line broadband was an extremely ridiculous idea to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] fidodo 27 points 1 year ago

The vast majority of the distance covered is using light as the transmission medium, so we can't really get much more efficient than that.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not the right place to ask, or maybe to be seen. But I watched ACG's video on this and I LOVE the classes and how meat n potatoes they are. No guffy [what I call] Horde style shit like Necromancer or whatever.

I've only ever played DnD once IRL in a discord and some online board thing, but I enjoyed the dice rolling and how posistioning worked. Is it a bit of xcom meets diablo if I twisted your arm to compare to another game genre? A friend and I tried that Gloomhaven game and we HATED it lol, but this looks a little more engaging at least from a very first glance.

Plus a few friends have picked it up, so i'm not sure if I could join their game to help kinda like we did with D4 which was super fun.

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[–] Etterra 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If it out out then? Nice. I'll wait for it to go on sale though. I'm poor AF.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't this basically the same with every bigger release?

[–] CupDock 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Normally pre-loading helps to even the load. For automatic updates, Steam strategically distributes them to even the load.

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