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When Baldur's Gate 3 came out, Steam's overall bandwidth consumption went from around 18 Tbps to 146 Tbps
(reddthat.com)
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.
At what point does it becomes cheaper to ship it to the buyer on a thumb drive?
Probably at no point ever again. Bandwidth is so cheap these days that producing and shipping anything is always going to be more expensive.
Tell that to the CRTC.
Some backup services charge less for shipping a hard drive then bandwidth, last I looked it was around 8tb to be cheaper (for the user) then restoring over the internet. So I'd guess it's around that mark, but I'm obviously not an expert.
My experience shipping things for large companies tells me that FedEx Express with volume discounts costs about $7-12 and you can buy a lot of terrabits of bandwidth for that much money.
However the idea of a branded thumb drive for every game sounds absolutely wicked and I'm now sad that isn't the reality we live in
When I tried to start downloading it yesterday morning the steam content servers were failing. I can't recall that happening before.
Or carrier pigeon for that matter