![]() ![]() Until NBA 2K13, 2K14, FIFA 14, 15 and 16 as far as I can remember you could buy disk versions of these games from Retail online stores like Amazon, GAME UK, BASE, etc. I felt deceived about that because I had to wait for the postman to send me a box only with a CD Key which I could’ve bought online at that time and save my time. When I bought the so-called physical version of NBA 2K15 PC there were no DVDs in it! It was simply a scratch card in a shiny box with the Steam serial number to register on Steam. This is a major frustration given the fact that me as a 100% PC Gamer can no longer buy Retail DVD PC games. With steam you cannot just pause, shut down your computer and recontinue the download, you are forced to wait out the whole time for the download to finish or the progress will be aborted and will have to be re-downloaded all the way from the beginning!! The download time with my 12Mbps connection would require between 23-24 hours while my PC is on all night. I have NBA 2K15 PC and Payday 2 that are over 50GB in size. I was going to mention the same frustration that I have with one of my games on Steam. ![]() That’s before you start looking at things like using wred and CoDel to improve the queuing in the routers in the path (if you have OpenWRT on your router turn fq-codel on it’ll improve your wifi performance) ![]() One of the reasons that FTTP is better than FTTC which is better than ADSL even with the same bandwidth available and that local CDN caches perform better than downloading from the other side of the planet Specifically using stateful firewalls and NAT devices has a major negative impact on throughput as the state tables expiring cause small amounts of packet loss which in turn leads to throughput reduction ( ) especially on higher latency links. If you have a look at the presentations from the event we came to a series of very clear recommendations about how the edges of networks need to be built in order to get the best performance. In choosing to test this (over a 4-day period) the analyst wisely opted to remove the negative impact of older / slower connections, which they achieved by only focusing upon customers with either the top 80Mbps FTTC ( VDSL2) tier (c.60-65Mbps average speed) or a 200-350Mbps package on Virgin Media’s cable DOCSIS network. As such the main restriction in any performance analysis is likely to be limited to the capabilities of your physical connection and any natural restrictions related to Steam’s own servers. Luckily in the UK we have quite an open and healthy market for peering between ISPs and content providers, which means that the multiple CDN approach shouldn’t make a lot of difference. “ Both are primarily served by Valve’s own CDN, with what appear to be backups using Stackpath (in Amsterdam) and Edgecast (in London).” For example, SamKnows states that Steam splits the United Kingdom into two cells – London and Manchester. The platform can also adopt a different approach for different countries and may even have special arrangements for certain ISPs. One of the ways it does this is by breaking downloads up into “ chucks” via multiple parallel TCP sessions, which can then be sent via several CDNs (useful for avoiding congested paths). Level3, Akamai, EdgeCast, Stackpath), as well as their own CDN. Popular video game platforms like Xbox (Microsoft) and PlayStation (Sony) have similar distribution services.īroadband ISPs have to be very mindful of such demanding but popular services, particularly as Steam can simultaneously harness multiple different Content Delivery Networks (e.g. The platform’s peak network utilisation currently tends to hover near 6Tbps (Terabits per second) and last year around 18% of PC game sales were made using the service (c.$4.3bn in revenue), although we should mention that they also handle titles for MAC and Linux users too. Today the combination of high-speed broadband and the demise of physical media means that services like Steam are in more demand than ever and some games are reaching 75GB (GigaBytes) in size. Steam was first launched in 2003, albeit initially more as a tool to help keep their most popular games updated (Counterstrike, Half Life etc.), but it soon evolved into a fully-fledged digital distribution platform. Internet speed analyst firm SamKnows has conducted an interesting study, which examines the performance differences of major UK broadband ISPs ( BT, TalkTalk, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media and Vodafone) when being tasked with downloading PC games from Valve’s popular Steam digital distribution platform. ![]()
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