Can we talk about how bad steam's preloading system is

[CuzzLiteBeer]

No other game distributor has me waiting an hour post launch to play the game. Why preload if it's gonna take just as long to unpack if not longer than to just download?? No other game service has this issue for me. Battlenet, origin and epic games all allow me to play game THE MINUTE of release. Holy valve what is going on here.

[Peterg]

It is always compressed.

[моściccкy.]

why its taking so long!
10% refund for unbelievable approach and dragging!

[Black_Phoenix]

Steam literally makes millions of dollars every minute and they can't have a halfway decent preload feature?

[Peterg]

Originally posted by Sacae:

Steam literally makes millions of dollars every minute and they can't have a halfway decent preload feature?

Request it.

[CuzzLiteBeer]

I know it's compressed and I know it has to be decrypted as the encryption is used to stop normal people like us from playing early. But cmon. I played Black Ops Cold War the minute it unlocked to the general public. ACTIVISION BLIZZARD IS DOING BETTER THAN VALVE WHAT IS THIIS

[Peterg]

People worship valve and steam for stupid reasons.

[Whar❓]

windows games launcher was better at unpacking files and that's the saddest thing I've said all week

[CuzzLiteBeer]

It seriously should just be like... start the decryption before the release date time if it's gonna take that long and lock the play button until launch minute. So what if some people get the .exe to launch the game like 30 minutes before everyone else. We've all already seen early gameplay from youtubers.

[LeakyAbstraction]

I suppose one advantage is that if the servers happen to be very slow at release, you'll already have the files, and just need to download the decryption key. :)

But you're right that it can be slower than downloading. The reason for this is that the preloaded files are encrypted with an AES-256 key, and when you decrypt them the Steam client has to read the files first, and write them back. This effectively halves the disk throughput, or worse.

It would be ideal if we could choose to save the preload files on a different disk than the target disk of the final installation. I guess the decryption won't go away, because they need to keep the files 100% unreadable to avoid leaks.

(But for me it's not a huge deal... I'll go to sleep now, and play tomorrow. 😆)

[Peterg]

You need a NVMe SSD.

[Theandros]

Originally posted by Sacae:

Steam literally makes millions of dollars every minute and they can't have a halfway decent preload feature?

Is this your first release date?

[NooDLeS]

Smoke some weed and chill out. I'm watching movies and eating banana muffins while I wait.

[IonCloud]

Originally posted by Peterg:

You need a NVMe SSD.

+1 I just got one a month ago 1TB on sale and my 2TB HDD use to take forever like 2 hrs + for 308 Mbs now it does 50GB in 20 mins or less and even starting up the game 5 seconds instead of 2 mins. HUGE difference using a NVMe SSD.

[SunEarthMewsic]

I can wait for 5 hours for a game to decrypt, or wait 20 minutes after release to download it.

Lol

[IonCloud]

Originally posted by NooDLeS:

Smoke some weed and chill out. I'm watching movies and eating banana muffins while I wait.

+1 sounds fun how a wait should be dealt with!