>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam
Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0])
Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0])
Patching 150GiB with a compressed 15GiB download just takes a lot of I/O. The alternative is downloading a fresh copy of the 150GiB install file, but those playing on DSL will probably let their SSD whizz a few minutes longer than spend another day downloading updates.
If your SSD is slower than your internet capacity, deleting install files and re-downloading the entire game will probably save you some time.
This is why the cost of the bug was so easy for the studio to ignore. An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years, so they might have asked the game studio to look into it.
Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.
It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P
> I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit
How hosting inside ISPs function? Does ISP have to MITM? I heard similar claims for Netflix and other streaming media, like ISPs host/cache the data themselves. Do they have to have some agreement with Steam/Netflix?
A lot of people are using large distributed DNS servers like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 and these cansometimes direct users to incorrect CDN servers, so EDNS was created to help with it. I always use 9.9.9.11 instead of 9.9.9.9 to hopefully help improve performance.
But you might be right - in a market where the price of the same good varies by two orders of magnitude, I could believe that even the nice vendors are charging a 400% markup.