How much do my downloads cost Valve?

[FlamingTP]

Out of curiousoty, I tried to find out how much it costs valve to upload data to steam users. I have been unable to find this information. So lets say I have 1TB worth of Steam games. How much money does valve have to spend in internet access to send that down the pipe?

[Τhe Rolling Cheese Wheel]

It doesn't cost them anything. Of course that could change if FCC doesn't unstuck their heads from their bungholes.

Transferring of data currently doesn't cost anybody any money whatsoever. The only cost for Valve would be to maintain their servers regularly. Of course server storage cost should also be factored it. Considering how much money is spend on steam, I figure they wouldn't even care if you downloaded 5 petabytes from them. Your ISP might whine though

[Kesac]

Actually, it does cost them money, in upstream bandwidth costs.

However, it's not a "set" cost, rather, they pay for how much bandwidth they can transfer at once. If you were downloading that 1TB of Steam Games at 1MByte/sec, and the server you're downloading from has a 100MByte/second pipe (800Mbit), then you'd be using 1% of the capacity of the pipe for 1 million seconds (about 11.5 days).

If 200 people were downloading at that rate, then they'd have to increase the size of the pipe, or everyone would have slower downloads.

[crunchyfrog]

BurtonJ has commented on this question before, and the costs are absolutely negligible.

[HLCinSC]

Originally posted by Τhe Rolling Cheese Wheel:

It doesn't cost them anything. Of course that could change if FCC doesn't unstuck their heads from their bungholes. .

This ^^^^. Did you see John Oliver's bit on it?

[FlamingTP]

well that wont happen. The head of the FCC is a former Comcast CEO, The president knew that when he was appointed.