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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.
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.
Yeah all very good points there. They stars have aligned well for them here, and they deserve all the success.