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.
Keep in mind that the game has been in Early Access for almost three years. Anybody who played the game in that span but hasn’t launched it since yesterday is going to push that percentage down.
Exactly my case, downloaded yesterday so I can play all weekend. Don’t have but an hour to play during the work week. Definitely not starting this game with just an hour.
i think thats a display bug. if i hover over my own “descent from avernus” it also shows me .1%, however if i hover over one of my coop partners it shows as 40%
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.
Yeah looks similar to Divinity Original Sin 2. I installed a camera mod on that so I could get lower and closer, but that of course caused some weirdness in the skybox.
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!
Yeah it technically would get across a similar meaning. And at this point I see “peaked” more often online than the right one. But “piqued” is the idiom— not that it matters all that much.
For a long time I mixed up deprecated (meaning, no longer supported) with depreciated (meaning, having lost value over time) because they can both kinda apply to the same situations, if you tilt your head the right way.
piqued implies a mild interest worthy of further investigation.
peaked implies interest can’t possibly get any higher, as though they were already super interested, but the ability to pan the camera eclipses all other interesting features.
An easy way to remember “milquetoast” is with context, here let me use it in a sentence:
“Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath is an Eccentric-class Offensive Unit.”
Not true, you definitely can with the right resolution. LoL wild rift especially is close enough (being mobile) you can absolutely make out the skins. They’re usually flashy and noticable enough everyone can tell what it is, too. They often have special animations, auras, attacks look different, etc. Some have special voice lines.
Like, just as an example, if you’re an actual walking tumor and play Teemo, but get the bumblebee skin, the little mushroom traps he leaves around become beehives.
Also remember League and DotA are big steaming games, and matches are repayable, so getting in with different camera angles on replay is very muxh a thing.
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 even had the download cancel midway through. I honestly can’t remember personally experiencing a game release that brought their servers to its knees. They should’ve really done at least a day of preload time though, that would’ve saved a lot of trouble.
And they had to make a bunch of posts and updates begging people to delete all saves and even completely uninstall the game. Hell, weeks ago they were flat out telling people not to even play it at all.
Which is all so silly. I really hope Valve took notice of all this, since it’s such a huge release. They could definitely do with some improvements to this whole EA -> full release. Even as simple as having an option for two downloads (old EA version you can play now OR prerelease full version you cannot play until x time on y date).
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
Socially acceptable T&A, same reason everybody was into The Witcher; with BG3 you can even tell your parents / girlfriend / whatever that it’s a sequel to a beloved game you remember from your childhood.
My friend there’s a lot of porn. And if you like the interactivity, there’s a lot of good porn games now. Check itch.io. The few seconds of titillation is not why most people are playing these games.
I mean there is no perfect option there really, you’re gonna piss people off either way. I would say though locking people from playing a full price AAA game they paid for is probably more controversial than not being able to provide a preload.
IIRC there is a website that does this with your library if you log in with steam. It just picks a random one from your library, and you may even be able to set filters or pick a specific collection.
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.
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.
I’m looking forward to the return of games so big they merit physical distribution. Like, the first terabyte game that comes on its own SSD - plug it into a spare M2 slot or a USB3 port and go.
You’re not going to see it unfortunately. They’ll just assume that you’re on gigabit and will spend 3 hours downloading it.
In a Datacenter that I have some equipment in, it’s $300 a month for 1gbps. At that cost, 3 hours of bandwidth costs them $1.20… this is cheaper than any current device that can hold 1TB by leaps and bounds. Forget that they’d have way bigger pipes than that and at a much better cost/gbps.
On top of that you can also program stuff to do distributed file serving (eg. bittorrent) to alleviate the datacenter costs too. So that $1.20 is a “worst case” scenario… and the costs plummet hard at each cost-cutting step they could take.
I have no info on it. I can speculate, and I’m happy to be corrected!
There is no way that physical media is greener.
Just the sheer production of physical media would be more than the servers, never mind the transportation, space in shops, people traveling to pick it up.
And then, day 1 rolls around and there would still be updates.
10x bandwidth for an hour is nothing.
And I’d consider everything up to the trunk routes of the internet. Ultimate, internet trunks and consumers are going to have internet. A data center peering to the trunks isn’t hugely power intensive, the networks are going to exist and the bandwidth is available, it’s mostly a matter of cost. So, it’s essentially steams datacenter impact.
Could probably estimate it.
If it’s able to deliver 150tbps, and we assume steam is using 100gbps networking per server (ultimately, it’s just file serving), that’s 1500 servers.
Say a server is 1.5kw, that’s 1.5kw of power and 1.5kw of heat. DC cooling is about 15%, so 1.77kw per server.
Or 2.7 MW for all 1500 servers.
Round that up to 3MW to account for backups, spares, switches etc.
So, let’s assume that the BG3 download took 3MW for 1 hour.
And, I feel, this is an over estimate.
Trucks are 300-500kw. Let’s take 300kw, best case.
A single DVD case (let’s ignore that this game is on the edge of a 4-layer bluray, and say it’s single disc) is 55 grams.
2.5m copies (the lowest sales estimate I’ve seen) would be 137,500 kilograms, or 137t.
A 44t artic truck can carry 24t of cargo (this depends on the actual truck and local regulations, of course).
So, moving 137t of discs requires 6 trucks.
6 X 300kw = 1.8 MW.
So, if it take more than 2 hours to truck these discs to get them to stores, then transportation is already over the DC power requirements.
I don’t think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that’s the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.
The main argument in favor of downloading is, it’s easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other “clean” sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.
No more than any other release. This is just notable because it was all at once, which Steam is usually good about distributing, but this time it didn’t work out and they took the traffic all at once.
Basically you’d see the same thing spread out over days with a usual steam release and the pre-loading that goes with it.
As for a physical release, I mean, I absolutely would if I could…
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sadly, there are already better games than BG3. im not super keen on BG3 at all.
Sadly? You should be happy that there are already better games, and go play them!
And still only 0.1% of players have ‘Descent from Avernus’
Are you even playing the game?
Keep in mind that the game has been in Early Access for almost three years. Anybody who played the game in that span but hasn’t launched it since yesterday is going to push that percentage down.
Lots of people are probably waiting until the weekend
Exactly my case, downloaded yesterday so I can play all weekend. Don’t have but an hour to play during the work week. Definitely not starting this game with just an hour.
Get your character created in that hour so you can just jump in later!
i think thats a display bug. if i hover over my own “descent from avernus” it also shows me .1%, however if i hover over one of my coop partners it shows as 40%
41.2% have it.
that’s a lot of tablepoons
It’s hard to get steam into tablespoons. I was really impressed.
Damn, The double whammy of jokes here got me good
That’s only like 9 Cups of Bandwidth
Damn that’s just over 1 and a half pints
A pint is 2 cups, so it’s actually 4.5 pints!
Take your upvote and get out of here
Didn’t know this stat was public. Cool
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.
You can actually zoom into a Mass Effect style over the shoulder camera position if you want.
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.
Yeah looks similar to Divinity Original Sin 2. I installed a camera mod on that so I could get lower and closer, but that of course caused some weirdness in the skybox.
Camera isn’t stuck in isometric view. You can zoom, pan, tilt and see all the fantastic detail.
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!
The zoom out is very limited. I constantly wish it could zoom out more
The inability to zoom out is my dealbreaker for Diablo. The limitation doesn’t feel immersive to me, it feels claustrophobic.
piqued*
Thanks, I wasn’t sure it was right but also too lazy to check.
and too lazy to edit 😅 just joking around
I’m leaving it for future generations.
Also so your correction makes sense ;)
pooped*
Please, please don’t take this as any insult or criticism, but for future reference, it’s “piqued”.
This particular homophone is almost as devious as “milquetoast”. (Sounds like “milk toast”)
Edit: someone beat me to it and now I feel like a jerk for piling on. Sorry!
I’m not the person you answered to, but as english ain’t my first language I figured I’d ask:
I get that this person was trying to say “piqued” as in “got my interest”
But wouldn’t “peaked” as in “my interest couldn’t possibly get higher as it has peaked from that new information” also be valid?
(I get it’s a saying, but as I’m not familiar with that saying in english it didn’t bother me, which is why I’m curious)
Yeah it technically would get across a similar meaning. And at this point I see “peaked” more often online than the right one. But “piqued” is the idiom— not that it matters all that much.
For a long time I mixed up deprecated (meaning, no longer supported) with depreciated (meaning, having lost value over time) because they can both kinda apply to the same situations, if you tilt your head the right way.
piqued implies a mild interest worthy of further investigation.
peaked implies interest can’t possibly get any higher, as though they were already super interested, but the ability to pan the camera eclipses all other interesting features.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
An easy way to remember “milquetoast” is with context, here let me use it in a sentence:
“Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath is an Eccentric-class Offensive Unit.”
See, didn’t that clear it all up?
It’s been about 5 or so years since I reread The Culture books. It might be time again.
That was always my confusion about people buying skins in league of legends or dota. I can barely see them!
Not true, you definitely can with the right resolution. LoL wild rift especially is close enough (being mobile) you can absolutely make out the skins. They’re usually flashy and noticable enough everyone can tell what it is, too. They often have special animations, auras, attacks look different, etc. Some have special voice lines.
Like, just as an example, if you’re an actual walking tumor and play Teemo, but get the bumblebee skin, the little mushroom traps he leaves around become beehives.
Also remember League and DotA are big steaming games, and matches are repayable, so getting in with different camera angles on replay is very muxh a thing.
You can use the scroll wheel to zoom in pretty darn close! Closer than you probably ever need to.
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?
riven was huge because it deserved the space.
I even had the download cancel midway through. I honestly can’t remember personally experiencing a game release that brought their servers to its knees. They should’ve really done at least a day of preload time though, that would’ve saved a lot of trouble.
Isn’t this basically the same with every bigger release?
Normally pre-loading helps to even the load. For automatic updates, Steam strategically distributes them to even the load.
There wasn’t a a pre-load for BG3 though, really. It was incompatible with their EA release.
And they had to make a bunch of posts and updates begging people to delete all saves and even completely uninstall the game. Hell, weeks ago they were flat out telling people not to even play it at all.
Which is all so silly. I really hope Valve took notice of all this, since it’s such a huge release. They could definitely do with some improvements to this whole EA -> full release. Even as simple as having an option for two downloads (old EA version you can play now OR prerelease full version you cannot play until x time on y date).
Yes, hence the unusual spike in this case
I misinterpreted your original comment. We agree, haha.
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
Socially acceptable T&A, same reason everybody was into The Witcher; with BG3 you can even tell your parents / girlfriend / whatever that it’s a sequel to a beloved game you remember from your childhood.
Every once in a while I stumble upon a comment online that inadvertently reveals a lot about the person who made the comment.
Married to a wife who has no problem with watching actual porn, but thanks for playing
She has no problem with actual porn but you’ll need to find an excuse/get permission to play BG3?
Doesn’t seem like a healthy relationship dude
You made two in a row! Impressive.
Sick burn, enjoy your elf-infused masturbation dude
C’mon, be serious my dude; githyanki > elf
Can’t get much hotter than Karlach tbh
Lemmy has bizarrely high number of commenters that I can only describe as “Ken M, but sincere and angry”.
Oh man I forgot about Ken.
bruh
My friend there’s a lot of porn. And if you like the interactivity, there’s a lot of good porn games now. Check itch.io. The few seconds of titillation is not why most people are playing these games.
Preorders exploded after news came out about bear sex.
Yeah because it’s funny and got people talking about the game
Really though, I wish nudity and sexuality wasn’t such a big taboo thing in society. So what if people get horny by the game, is that a bad thing?
It probably is, ya
But why?
Why couldn’t it be preloaded?
Because it would disrupt being able to continue playing early access right upto release, I remember reading in a tweet
Personally, I would have opted for just stopping early access to preload but people have gotten angry over stupider stuff before, I guess
I mean there is no perfect option there really, you’re gonna piss people off either way. I would say though locking people from playing a full price AAA game they paid for is probably more controversial than not being able to provide a preload.
And I helped!!!
So that’s why my download took 15 hours.
And it still gave me 800Mbps consistently right at launch time. Good servers.
Crys in low internet speed
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.
so high quality that they go down for maintenance every Tuesday…
That seems pretty normal if you want your servers to stay high quality?
normal? not at all. Imagine if youtube went down every week, and they have way more overhead than steam
You mean if Youtube had regularly scheduled maintenance every week?
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
What, you just play “Steam”? :)
Yeah, it’s got a very satisfying game loop:
I always wanted to start a let’s play channel where a just play a random game from my libraryb every time. I have so many I never even touched
IIRC there is a website that does this with your library if you log in with steam. It just picks a random one from your library, and you may even be able to set filters or pick a specific collection.
https://thewheelhaus.com/
And at best only during specific sales like the Steam deck their servers became unresponsive for a bit.
I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.
Steam has a 30% cut, so, that pays
Isn’t Steam download peer to peer additionally from their servers?
Only on the local network.
Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that. Is this automatic, or does it need to be configured somehow?
automatic for me. as long as u have 2 pc’s with steam open on the same network, it’ll do a local transfer
Because they use Akamai as a CDN.
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.
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.
This guy life cycle analysis
Just a note that commercially produced disks aren’t burned they’re pressed. I’m not sure which is better environmentally however.
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.
I’m looking forward to the return of games so big they merit physical distribution. Like, the first terabyte game that comes on its own SSD - plug it into a spare M2 slot or a USB3 port and go.
You’re not going to see it unfortunately. They’ll just assume that you’re on gigabit and will spend 3 hours downloading it.
In a Datacenter that I have some equipment in, it’s $300 a month for 1gbps. At that cost, 3 hours of bandwidth costs them $1.20… this is cheaper than any current device that can hold 1TB by leaps and bounds. Forget that they’d have way bigger pipes than that and at a much better cost/gbps.
On top of that you can also program stuff to do distributed file serving (eg. bittorrent) to alleviate the datacenter costs too. So that $1.20 is a “worst case” scenario… and the costs plummet hard at each cost-cutting step they could take.
Most of the distance covered by internet transmission is transmitted by light. It’s as efficient as it gets.
I have no info on it. I can speculate, and I’m happy to be corrected!
There is no way that physical media is greener.
Just the sheer production of physical media would be more than the servers, never mind the transportation, space in shops, people traveling to pick it up.
And then, day 1 rolls around and there would still be updates.
10x bandwidth for an hour is nothing.
And I’d consider everything up to the trunk routes of the internet. Ultimate, internet trunks and consumers are going to have internet. A data center peering to the trunks isn’t hugely power intensive, the networks are going to exist and the bandwidth is available, it’s mostly a matter of cost. So, it’s essentially steams datacenter impact.
Could probably estimate it.
If it’s able to deliver 150tbps, and we assume steam is using 100gbps networking per server (ultimately, it’s just file serving), that’s 1500 servers.
Say a server is 1.5kw, that’s 1.5kw of power and 1.5kw of heat. DC cooling is about 15%, so 1.77kw per server.
Or 2.7 MW for all 1500 servers.
Round that up to 3MW to account for backups, spares, switches etc.
So, let’s assume that the BG3 download took 3MW for 1 hour.
And, I feel, this is an over estimate.
Trucks are 300-500kw. Let’s take 300kw, best case.
A single DVD case (let’s ignore that this game is on the edge of a 4-layer bluray, and say it’s single disc) is 55 grams.
2.5m copies (the lowest sales estimate I’ve seen) would be 137,500 kilograms, or 137t.
A 44t artic truck can carry 24t of cargo (this depends on the actual truck and local regulations, of course).
So, moving 137t of discs requires 6 trucks.
6 X 300kw = 1.8 MW.
So, if it take more than 2 hours to truck these discs to get them to stores, then transportation is already over the DC power requirements.
I don’t think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that’s the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.
The main argument in favor of downloading is, it’s easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other “clean” sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.
No more than any other release. This is just notable because it was all at once, which Steam is usually good about distributing, but this time it didn’t work out and they took the traffic all at once.
Basically you’d see the same thing spread out over days with a usual steam release and the pre-loading that goes with it.
As for a physical release, I mean, I absolutely would if I could…
And that was just one copy.
That’s nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.
Imagine the number of bad peer dependences
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
“coworker”
Jfc, what kind of website are they working on needing such an immense amount of different packages?
Leftpad
A contact form.
A hello world example page
Reddit 3rd party app, according to Reddit devs
I need better glasses; my first read through I thought that was his nude_models directory and I wondered, exactly, where do you work?
That would make sense for this game.