When it comes to how things are running today, we’re all focusing on beating the coronavirus. There is a real health pandemic out there and for those that are not sick or well enough to stay home, you can easily start to develop some cabin fever. Quarantine makes it to where you’re stuck at home and unable to socialize in person or really venture outdoors if it’s not crucial. This ultimately means that more people are browsing and using the internet.
Now the worry is making sure the internet is stabilized and it’s resulted in several companies doing their best to keep bandwidth in check. In certain markets, we’ve seen streaming services drop quality to their services or even throttle the speeds offered. This is also playing a role in the video game industry. Sony was quick to throttle download speeds and we’re finding out that Valve’s digital marketplace client, Steam, is also making a big change.
“For games that haven’t been played recently, Steam has already been scheduling updates for the next off-peak local time period. Beginning this week, we are now spreading these updates out over several more days. Only games played within the last 3 days will be updated immediately. As always, the game will begin updating immediately if you request to play it, and you can always initiate an update (or pause it indefinitely) through the Download Manager. We’re also looking into additional solutions to help on our side. “
Steam has an auto-update feature that will make sure your games that are installed will be updated whenever a patch is sent out. Now moving forward, Steam will be changing how they update video games. Instead of updating every game when a patch is sent out, Steam will only update the games you played within the last three days. This is for auto-updates so you’re still able to update games manually if you choose to play a title that wasn’t recently opened.
The auto-updates will also not be used during peak hours so that should also help spread the bandwidth usage. It doesn’t look like there is any throttling done from Steam outside of the auto-updates, but in the same post that Steam alerted the auto-update changes they made a list of other ways you can help control the bandwidth being used on your PC. Likewise, they did state that they are also looking into additional solutions to help.
