Torrent based download

[Fritz125]

I have being thinking of this recently that you buy a game excited but then...you need to wait for a slow download whand i tought:why don't implement Torrent based download to steam or give option to download the torrent file and then we download it via Utorrent.
the first one is better because with that much seeders it will be very fast but with second one you can still keep standard modeand give the players the choice

[Insanity Claus]

I would be all for this. It could help lighten a bit of load on Valve's end.

I don't ever picture Valve allowing for 3rd party clients, but they could do something similar to the way Blizzard does their BattleNET service, which uses Blizzard's own servers as well as well as user-based bittorrent.

Obviously, entirely relying on users would be a bad idea, but it could help to minimize server strain during big sales events.

[Tito Shivan]

Valve distributes files from which they don't hold rights. Deploying them in a P2P environment would probably set them in a legal muddy ground.

P2P clients set up an specific set of issues clientside
-computer performance issues.
-firewall & routing issues.
-Network issues.
-Users leeching/not seeding

P2P infrastructures pose also ISP related issues
-Bandwith throttling.
-Protocol banning.
-Capped/tiered internet connection.

Although P2P has it's advantages, direct download still offers the most direct, straightforward and reliable way of dispatching the data from Steam servers.

[Spawn of Totoro]

My internet is soft capped. That cap includes upload and download. If I excedd that cap, I pay more.

Are you going to pay me for the use of my bandwidth?

[lyndwyrm9999]

I just had a discussion with some friends about something like this.
Tito Shivan has some good points about the legal muddy ground and other issues, but I tend to think most of them could be worked around, especially if steam made/acquired their own client.

Steam doesn't own many of the games they distribute, but all they would have to do is negotiate with the developers/producers the right to distribute via torrent. Some would probably be concerned and say "no" on principle of distributing via Peer-to-Peer. Others would probably be all for it, look at blizzard.

As for network issues, firewall and routing issues are normally pretty easy to fix. Issues like NAT tables filling, I imagine are pretty difficult to work around on the software side. As for protocol banning and bandwidth throttling, not an issue that can be fixed in a client, but honestly sounds like an unfair tactic to me.

Leeching can also be worked around by tracker methods of preventing a user from downloading new games unless games that are installed are either actively seeding or have a ratio above 1.1.

So yes DDL is the most direct way of distributing, and torrenting does have issues, but DDLs also have issues that I'd rather not get into here. As a user with a pretty fast connection it would be quite convenient to be able to get faster, occasionally more reliable, downloads that implicitly don't fail if I lose internet/power.