I liked my Steam ideas so much i made a thread

[richpull]

If it were released on Steam on September 30th then imagine the amount of downloading that would be taking place, lets say 200,000 people trying to download 1000mb each. That is two hundred million megabytes of information, trying to be downloaded from a small network of sources.
To figure the rate of download from Steam servers, let's say that the fastest user connections are about 700kb/s and the slowest being 50kb/s. I dont think that 56k people would even try.
200,000*375 (375kb/s median end user optimal download speed)

Is 75,000,000 KB/s demand, (or 75,000MB/s). It seems highly unlikely that Valve could muster enough servers to host that type of demand. That would require a dedicated OC-12 or OC-48 to serve that. If you check out Google.com and type in oc 48 internet backbone you will find the pricing is skyhigh. It doesnt seem feasible to do that, it probobly wouldn't be the best dispersal resources. More likely they would need to rent servers throughout the world in order to supply the game across continents. I wonder if Vivendi has some part in supplying Valve with distribution servers... wouldn't that delay HL2 on a steam release too?

 

[trantjd]

um, Valve uses servers from a lot of different companies. The companies get ad space on Steam in return.

http://www.steampowered.com/status.html

 

[STAFFp18]

Don't be pessimistic. I still have the least bit of hope that Valve may release it via steam first, or AT LEAST, the Very Least, a playable "tech" demo

 

[SLH]

They have several content servers already: http://www.steampowered.com/status.html

I expect they will rent more out temporarally when HL2 is released, but i still think it will become sluggish, at least for a few days.

 

[Anubis]

Speaking of ads in steam. Who really clicks on them?. I mean, the only time I use steam is when I want to play a game. I'm not going to click a banner when my game is loading!

Anubis

 

[Nuclear_Gerber]

lol, yeah, the banner while the game loads aint so smart. well atleast they shouldnt have made it clickable.

And, 75TB is quite high, but what can you do.

 

[bUsh[ES]]

Well, the point of the ad isn't so much clicking (if it was they would probably be product advertisements) but moreso just to advertise the provider. If you were shelling out the bandwidth and maintainence costs to be a content server, you'd at least want your name\logo showing up for each connection, right?

Anyway, Rich, the original (albeit somewhat failed) concept for Steam was to provide an intelligent background downloader that ties into your playing. If 200,000 people were to start playing HL2, the assumption is that not everyone will need every bit of content available from the start. If you were to poll some people, you'd probably end up with results that mirror the assumption. Therefore, Steam would download just enough to get you started playing Level 1 and maybe 2 for example, and while you're playing, would be downloading the next level.

 

[-JeZ-]

Sounds interesting bush. Could work. But there's still nowhere to sobscibe to anything on steam (At least I haven't found anywhere). Maybe that will be active in a patch on or about 30/9.

 

[OCybrManO]

Originally posted by Nuclear_Gerber
And, 75TB is quite high, but what can you do.

75,000,000 KB/s is 75GB/s

 

[mouse]

think it was a typo as half life 2 is definatly going to be over a gb isnt it? Thats just about 75 people downloading it otherwise . I know this delay might of pissed a feww people off but thats a bit far

 

[OCybrManO]

"GB/s" means "Gigabytes per second"

To figure the rate of [200,000 people] download[ing] from Steam servers, let's say that the fastest user connections are about 700kb/s and the slowest being 50kb/s. I dont think that 56k people would even try.
200,000*375 (375kb/s median end user optimal download speed)

 

[Epsi]

They're gonna pre-load HL2 before release to spread the load a bit as well.