Hacker News Reader

Comment by egeres | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably being naive, but I feel surprised that in 2025, a platform like Steam (which has existed for well over 2 decades and has around 70M DAU) is having this type of issues. I don't want to downplay the complex engineering behind scale and massive surges of demand, but it's not like it's their first rodeo. What seems to be blocking users from getting the game is accepting payments, nothing computationally complex per se IMO

View on HN

Huge spikes over a short period of time are hard to deal with for anyone, and payment processors have their own infra whose scalability Steam can't necessarily control.

Payment systems turn out to be particularly thorny because they hit an intersection of technical issues with conflicting goals:

* You want them to be as fast as possible (ideally: instantaneous)

* You want them to be validated (long-poll to a third party validation service)

* You need them to be sequentially auditable (this is a "... or you could go to jail" requirement)

* If a failure occurs, you don't want to be out your own money

While these are solvable, it's the reason that so many cloud services suddenly hit scaling issues at the payments layer: things are going great and then that layer gets involved and "oops, hold on, we're waiting on Visa's servers. Still waiting. Stillllll waiiiiiting..........." Or the team was certain they'd simultaneously solved speed and sequential auditability this time but, oops, there's yet another sequencing point that's actually a bottleneck.

Credit card based payment systems really shouldn't suffer these kinds of problems: The entire reason why credit cards exist in the first place (compared to debit cards) is to enable distributed, asynchronous, eventually-consistent payments. It should be perfectly normal for a business like steam to simply store the details necessary to process payment and then eventually reconcile with them, at a pace that the processors can handle. Instead we've built a world that operates under physics-violating assumptions. Gah.

The fact that every platform, even the biggest, richest, and most "has their shit together" you can name, has had this problem at some point, points to it not actually being as solvable as you would expect.

Also considering how Steam gets hammered every big sale launch. Well I am not even sure that hurts their sales that much. So as long as your site continues to somewhat work and you recover in hours it is not in the end big deal.

I think pay to view events might have hardest time as then there is actual need to be available at that exact time.

>I think pay to view events might have hardest time as then there is actual need to be available at that exact time.

True, though many of them have at least an hour or two of intro/opening ceremony/commentary to troubleshoot as people slowly join, so it's not the end of the world if the stream crashes up top.

Is something wrong in payment and/or entertainment spaces? Not just that there is ongoing censorship problem, but there's also sudden increase of PC port of mobile games, and now this. Feels like there could be common root cause of a profitability problem.

It's not like this kind of thing happens everyday. If Valve spent the money and effort to prevent itself from something like this, it could, but would it be worth it?

No system is completely redundant proof. It's just a matter of money and infrastructure. They didn't have any preorder system in place even so everyone had to search, buy and download all at the same time. It's probably close if not more than a million people waiting for a countdown to buy it.

Bad planning, maybe but definitely not a conspiracy against the game.

In this specific instance, I am mildly surprised preorders weren't offered. That would have taken some load off their servers and granted them money sooner; win-win for them.

That's because the studio's ethics are against pre-orders (and of course any type of lootboxes, microtransactions etc). I'm also happy they settled on a relatively low price tag of 19.50€, other studios would have marked it around 60€ to milk their user's wallets taking advantage of all the anticipation built up these years, kudos to team cherry

Interesting. I hadn't considered the possibility that the studio had a say in the preorder process, since the marketplace company is a separate company.

Agree with you actually, I think every 'gamer' has bitten the bullet on a pre order and been very disappointed. It's usually the publishers decision in the end and it's to guage demand, but in this case, it shows there is a less greedy reason for doing it sometimes.

90% preorders are terrible deals. Games are bugfest on launch. There was one game I violated no-preorder policy of mine - Cyberpunk, and everybody knows how it went (very poorly).

No-preorders is basically same as no-capes. Just don't do it.

What I don't understand is why Steam and others don't use a torrent-like protocol on their back-end to reduce their bandwidth requirements large numbers of customers downloading the game at the same time. Back in the day WOW used used it for distributing large patches it seems to be a solved problem.

In an interview, Gabe commented on his very question. Answer was that this involves a bunch of technical complexity vs just spending money on the problem. Steam also has such an enormous library now vs a single game company that you are still going to be mostly dependent on a few huge seeders.

i mean on the one hand yeah on the other its not that big of a technical problem. having one game vs hundreds well torrent trackers have been doing that since forever, and yeah you would need super seeders but isnt that still less load than have to run a http or upt based download server?

They actually have implemented this in a very limited context. You can download games from other machines on your local network.

For any P2P protocols to work, including BitTorrent, you need to be able to access the other nodes. In today's world, that's becoming harder because everyone and their granny are gradually being hidden behind a strict CGNAT.

IPv6 ??

That's the implicated solution to this problem, correct.

But you have a bunch of people on HN opposed to it for no good reason other than "IPv4 works for me™".

Downloading the game wasn't a problem for anyone, as far as I know the CDN held up fine. The problem was the steam storefront, i.e. actually buying the game.

This makes sense because there are several live service games on steam that have hundreds of thousands of active players - any update will put a large instantaneous load on the CDN as all the clients are forced to update at the same time, and this happens extremely frequently so they've had to get good at handling it.

What doesn't happen very frequently is hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy a game at exactly the same time, because most games have pre-orders.

Why then does Path of Exile (especially the new 2, which is only 1-2 steps in popularity below Silksong right now on SteamDB) bothers with still including a predownload torrent on every big update ?

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3829091

The PoE torrent is for their own distribution of their game (as opposed to Steam/Epic, with which the torrent can't be used) - I imagine Grinding Gear's own distribution stack is not as robust as the big ol' platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com