Steam sets new records for interactive players as people make their own at home during coronavirus violence. More than 23.5 million players entered Steam on Monday afternoon, according to data from attendees Steam Database, has more than 1.12 million players inside Rating-Strike: Offensive Worldwide – The highest total of all time.
To counter this unprecedented spike, Valve is making some changes to how Steam handles updates as the company tries to manage bandwidth. The company said it would update other games on Steam users' libraries more often. Here's how Valve describes the change in Steam blog:
In games that haven't been played recently, Steam is already planning a near-term review of local time tips. Starting this week, we're now distributing these updates over many days. Only games played in the last 3 days will immediately be renewed. As always, the game will start updating as soon as you request it, and you can always launch an update (or pause) with the Download Manager. We are also looking at additional solutions to help our side.
Valve also encourages Steam users to manage their bandwidth usage by the following steps:
Set up automatic renewal window! This will ensure that Steam does not start updating the game while you are in the middle of your workday.
If you don't play the game in your library often, you can keep it installed but opt out of downloading automatic updates.
You can manually renew your connection to Steam. This can ease the load on your network connection, and can help reduce bandwidth loads if network traffic in your area needs to be reduced.
Take advantage of the Library folder settings, so that you can transfer the most frequently played games from SSD to the final HDD. This is usually better for you (and your bandwidth) than to uninstall the game and need to download it later.
Valve's efforts to manage bandwidth follow similar moves from companies like Sony Interactive Entertainment, which delayed download speeds for PlayStation Network in the U.S. and Europe, and similar streaming video platforms Netflix, YouTube, Disney Plus, Amazon, and Apple.
