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])
You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...). I still find these things hard to accept.
Steam update durations depend on compression + CPU performance + SSD I/O. Things will be harder when the disk is almost full and live defragmentation kicks in to get free space for contiguous files. Some SSDs are fast enough to keep up with such a load, but a lot of them will quickly hit their DRAM limits and suddenly that advertised gigabyte per second write speed isn't all that fast. Bonus points for when your SSD doesn't have a heatsink and moving air over it, making the controller throttle hard.
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.
In this case, the bug was 131 GB of wasted disk space after installation. Because the waste came from duplicate files, it should have had little impact on download size (unless there's a separate bug in the installer...)
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.
This article presents it as a big success, but it could be read the opposite way: "Developers of Helldivers 2 wasted 130 GB for years and didn't care because it was others people computers"
> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years
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
Isn't it a little reductive to look at basic infrastructure costs? I used Hetzner as a surrogate for the raw cost of bandwidth, plus overheads. If you need to serve data outside Europe, the budget tier of BunnyCDN is four times more expensive than Hetzner.
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.
Yea, I always laugh when folks talk about how expensive they claim bandwidth is for companies. Large “internet” companies are just paying a small monthly cost for transit at an IX. They arent paying $xx/gig ($1/gig) like the average consumer is. If you buy a 100gig port for $2k, it costs the same if you’re using 5 GB a day or 8 PB per day.
> 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?
Yea netflix will ship a server to an ISP (Cox, comcast, starlink, rogers, telus etc) so the customers of that ISP can access that server directly. It improves performance for those users and reduces the load on the ISP’s backbone/transit. Im guessing other large companies will do this as well.
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.
The CDN/content provider ships servers to the ISP which puts them into their network. The provider is just providing connectivity and not involved on a content-level, so no MITM etc needed.
Makes sense, initial claim was that HD2 size was mainly because of duplicated assets, and any compression worth it's salt would de-duplicate things effectively.
Some powerful retro handhelds support Linux loading, such as: Retroid Pocket 5, Mini, and Flip 2 on the five-year-old SD865, and more recently, Ayn Odin 2 (original, Mini, and Portal) on the three-year-old SD8 Gen 2 (which is one version lower than the SoC in Steam Frame (SD8 Gen 3)).
So if we get a native arm version of Steam and Proton ARM64EC, we will essentially already have mini Steam Deck(s), and since you want something similar to a PSP, you can check out the Ayn Odin 2 Mini, it's similar to the PS Vita, but I'm not sure if it's still available for sale, or you can order the Retroid Pocket 6 (available in a few months), which has the same chip, but a better screen and is also small in size.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Steam states that you can simply run the x86-64 Steam client under emulation, in FEX-Emu or Box64. Results on existing mobile hardware seem promising already.
I have about 5 "post market" devices and only two of them have any support in postmarketOS: Redmi 4x, in which hardware acceleration does not work and I have not been able to run any DE on it and Pixel 4a, in which judging by the pmOS wiki page works just about everything except the most important part of a modern phone - touchscreen
postmarketOS provides tooling, documentation and a helpful community ... at some point, you'll need to put in the work, or sell your used devices and buy other, better supported used devices to work around this.
Is it really unfortunate that there's no (known) mainline/close to mainline touchscreen driver for the Pixel 4a? Absolutely. But it won't magically appear without somebody putting in the necessary effort.
This is a clickbait (or fake) news from a user (site has UGC feature) on a Russian news site, which some English-language news media for some reason used without fact checking
https://overclockers.ru/blog/Dante/show/160459/Po-rossijskim... (you can translate it via google translate)
Google is quite sneaky with updates: I own a Pixel 4a, which has guaranteed major updates ending in August (in a few days), but it's like Android 14 is purposely delayed and will come out most likely in September and thus skipping the 4a
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])
[0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/