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submitted 1 year ago by scops@reddthat.com to c/games@lemmy.world

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@lemmy.world 150 points 1 year ago

that's a lot of tablepoons

[-] morgan_423@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] PMmesexypajamas@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago

That's only like 9 Cups of Bandwidth

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[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 107 points 1 year ago

And that was just one copy.

[-] TheFriendlyArtificer@lemmy.world 51 points 1 year ago

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

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.world 17 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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[-] Neato@kbin.social 89 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago

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@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

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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[-] SoaringDE@feddit.de 14 points 1 year ago

I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.

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[-] dan1101@lemmy.world 55 points 1 year ago

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@lemmy.world 80 points 1 year ago

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

[-] snooggums@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago

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!

[-] carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

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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[-] exscape@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

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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[-] Oha@feddit.de 53 points 1 year ago

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

[-] SpermGoobler@lemmy.blue 40 points 1 year ago

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

[-] loutr@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] mates1500@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago

it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.

[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 13 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] o_oli@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago

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!

[-] emptyother@programming.dev 21 points 1 year ago

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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[-] PrototypeArchie@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 year ago

Didn't know this stat was public. Cool

[-] vermingot@lemmy.world 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@lemmy.world 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.

[-] Muffi@programming.dev 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 61 points 1 year ago

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@lemmy.world 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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[-] Etterra@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] Sev@feddit.uk 13 points 1 year ago

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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[-] Azzu@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

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

[-] CupDock@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

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

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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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