Cloud storage to download games?

[Swagonometry]

Trying to add my google drive as a drive on steam but no dice, any insight? thanks

[ReBoot]

What's the point though?

[Komarimaru]

You can only download and install games on a physical drive last I checked.

[Swagonometry]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Komarimaru:

You can only download and install games on a physical drive last I checked.

saw someone use a google drive for game downloads

[Komarimaru]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Swagonometry:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Komarimaru:

You can only download and install games on a physical drive last I checked.

saw someone use a google drive for game downloads

Well, it is possible to mount your cloud as local storage, yes. But that makes it seem like it's a physical drive. Also keep in mind, this generally requires a fast connection to even play said games, aka gigabit speeds imho.

If you're using google, try Google Workspace, formerly known as Gsuite. No idea if it still works, so keep this in mind. I do know that default cloud size for free, is limited. Meaning, 5GB total(aka, not many games except small indie ones) and only 1TB of access allowed a month(Adds up quick streaming data) among many other limits.

So, for example, say you want to install a small game. Let's say..

Wall World.

You'd pay 3 cents a month per GB to store it, so 6 cents(2GB game). Then you'd also pay the retrieval fee as you're playing it, so 2-5 cents per gigabyte streamed to you.

Now, say Baldur's Gate 3, a game you own. 133GB installed. That's $4 a month fee. And knowing that the game reads around 160MB's a second on average as it loads areas around you while moving, load screens etc, you'd be looking at... in 7 seconds, you'd have streamed 1GB. That's a 2-5 cent fee every 7 seconds. So 16-40 cents a minute to play. So, at the minimum, you'd have paid $10 to play a single hour, up to $24 an hour. Now, this is if your connections can handle said read speed, since most nvme drives read in the thousands MB/s.

Hence my comment of, you are kinda limited to physical drives, unless you're willing to pay the fees each month to not be free tier and have a high speed and stable connection.

[[N]ebsun]

you may as well just uninstall and re-install from Steam each time you want to play the game

[Kage Goomba]

You could - but the problem is you're at the mercy of network latency when synch/transactions take place.

There's little to no point at that rate.

Why would you want to do that? To what end?

Even then you need a physical drive to manage it in the first place.