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

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.

I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.

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

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?

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.

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

it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.

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

Blizzard's Downloader used torrents.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/

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.

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.

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