this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Steam Deck
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It makes perfect sense if you're a systems engineer.
Downloading games costs bandwidth.
Steam services millions of customers daily.
Valve, correctly, decided to do a bit of load-balancing by prioritizing updates by how recently and frequently you play them, and spreads them out.
This is nicer to their systems, and its nicer to most people who don't live alone and have to share internet with other human beings in their home (or at work).
You'd think it would be no big deal, bandwidth is "infinite" and "free" in most peoples minds. But there is a maximum throughput, and there is a cost in energy, time, performance, and money.
Load-balancing, people. It saves lives.
Counterpoint, I couldn't give two fucks about a billion dollar companies bottom line and if you have bandwidth problems at home I don't give a fuck and you can configure your client and router to deal with it.
No reason in the world valve can't do what my Xbox does.
Unless they changed it in the last couple of months Xbox does the same thing. When I still had my XSX there were updates sitting idly in the queue all the time.
And countercounterpoint this is also an environmental issue. Unless you don’t give a fuck about that either.
It's a configuration item.
As for "environmental issue" 👌👍🤣 resorting to the edgiest of trivial cases in technology as a reason to not do something is absurd. A 25GB hit to a CDN over a month is nothing. At scale either.
Name one other place you expect that level of efficiency. You expect that level of efficiency on Linux repos? What about general purpose desktop applications? I shouldn't get an auto update because I haven't opened an app?
This is expected behavior in any package management application. If someone uses too much cut them off like you would any other repo.
There is no Linux distribution that downloads updates immediately either. I don’t know if you’re ignorant, or just an idiot, but auto updates in Linux distros run on cron jobs, so the load would be balanced anyway because not everyone is in the same time zone. Same for consoles like your Xbox.
Try having millions of concurrent users all trying to update at the same time.
A single dota 2 update could use around 2-3% of the global internet bandwidth.
I actually seem to remember that back in ~wrath of the lich king (world of warcraft) Blizzard WASN'T doing this.
While blizzard had enough capacity to handle 12+million people trying to download the update because they prepped for it, the internet itself did not, and I want to say Verizon basically got its backbone DDoS'd and taken down.
Needless to say, Blizzard started breaking out it's updates, using CDNs and cache servers, etc etc because Verizon had some very choice words (possibly coming from their legal department.)
So you want to DDoS their CDN so you never get your update. You seem very smart.
And this is how the prisoner's dilemma is lost.
You sound like a very selfish person.
Tbf selfish is how one should interact with for profit institutions. Particularly the larger ones.
A billion dollar company giving 2 fucks about their bottom line is probably how they become a billion dollar company in the first place.