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73 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4wow.
from TFA: "Steam has delivered approximately 10 million gigabytes of data since the first of the year."
from the digg: " 100 million gigabytes" "1000TB of bandwidth!" "9765.625 terabytes"
10 million GB = 10,000,000 GB = 10,000 TB = 10 PB (that's Petabytes).
mmm I love people who stop to breathe before posting. indeed I do. - Daem0nX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Steam uses BitTorrent for some of the file transfers, so before anyone jumps to "OMG what a huge bill", why don't you ask how much bandwidth was "donated" via other non company computers/lines such as from you and me?
It's just like WoW's updater - it also uses BT for transferring data. - TC-14, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2A few pointers tawker:
A: This is a duplicate of a story 3 days old, Digg does point out duplicate stories before you post them
http://digg.com/gaming/Steam_by_the_Numbers_-_The_Hard_Facts
B: The whole title of this story is incorrect and does not match what is mentioned in the article.
"Steam has delivered approximately 10 million gigabytes of data since the first of the year."
10,000,000 GB ≈ 10,000 TB ≠ 1,000 TB (that's an approximate symbol and a not equal to symbol btw)
Steam has almost crossed the 1000TB [should be 10,000TB] mark of bandwidth usage on their Steam service using 100 million gigabytes [should be 10 million GB] or almost 9 765.625 terabytes [you got a figure correct but it does match with what you previously typed] !
Not only that but you didn't mention that was since the beginning of the year, so chances are that Steam has transferred over double that amount since the beginning of its service (16th February 2002).
And for those who don't know much about Steam, feel free to look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(content_delivery)
And please check your article next time tawker. - dgath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+285899345920000000 bits
10737418240000000 bytes
10485760000000 kilobytes (abbreviated as KB or Kb*)
10240000000 megabytes (abbreviated as M or MB)
10000000 gigabytes (abbreviated as G or GB)
9765.625000 terabytes
9.5367432 petabytes
0.00931323 exabytes - white, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1steam doesn't use bittorrent. and the number is so high because they serve updates to their customers, not because people go to steam.com
- gishnob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1how much does this cost to valve?
- Valnar300, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1IF I only had a hard drive that size... *SIGH*
- toveling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's almost 10000 tb of bandwidth.
- G-RaZoR, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Besides, this is transfer over an entire year.... Not space, so they don't need 10000 hard drives. They have download mirrors all accross the globe, that alone would lower the costs by millions.
- vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1invader -
timdoor's math was correct enough given the "fuzzy" numbers given. How are geeks like us going to do acurate math, when they give numbers like 10 million gigabytes? Do they really mean 10 million gigabytes, or do they really mean 10485760 gigabytes (as in 10 Petabytes)? - glitchbit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1bandwidth vs tangiable plastic cd and shipping and box, which do you think cost more?
- crapiolio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0IN 10 years we'll be have TB PC's. No big deal.
- tawker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0So, a new digg story, "Google calculator makes error!" - someone with a real (read: non-blog) site post it and submit it, that would ignite a bit of a flame war to say the least!
- vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0guspaz -
I got a quote from them about a year and a half ago, it was about $200 for 100mb and $1000 for 1gb. (provided I remember correctly) So possibly prices changed? That, or the prices are different based on location. Maybe they have surplus bandwidth in my neck of the woods. - deepsub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@ramble
I have degrees in engineering and computer science, and worked at 4 major chip design firms, and in that universe, counting bits is a BASE 2 game. The only folks who count using base 10 are the hard drive makers. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Then, Valve tries to capitalize on Counter-Strike (a mod which they did not create) by releasing Condition Zero, which sucked ass but people still bought it. Now we had the non-Steam purists at 1.5 (an extremely healthy user base up until the shutdown of the WON servers), those brave enough to use Steam at 1.6, and the silly people who actually bought CZ and maintained it was better than CS. Then comes Counter-Strike: Source and splits everything up even MORE! Way to kill the community..."
They bought it before it even left beta, and if you played the beta, you'd know the the CS we know and love, is almost entire Valve's work. How dare they try to profit from it! Updating the graphics ... and then having people play it!? Blasphamy! - timdorr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That's approximately 2.5368Gbps of bandwidth. So, probably about $100K to $50K per month, depending on how much they've negotiated pricing and the quality of their network connectivity.
- Cerberus047, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0they can afford it because they get more money than most sofware developers because it is really hard to pirate games.. even with the no steam crack you cant play online so lots of people say screw it and they buy it
- vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ramble -
Bandwidth is ALWAYS base2, as are most other measurements in computers. Only storage (hard drives, flash, DVD, but not RAM or CD) is measured in base10, and that is purely because of marketing BS. Floppys are rally odd, because they are not 1.44 x 1024 x 1024, nor are they 1.44 x 1000 x 1000, they are 1.44 x 1000 x 1024.
On the other hand, in a way you are correct, because they should have used the more "correct" unit of GiB (gibibytes new base2 unit) not the traditional GB (gigabytes now base10 only). But because they were talking about bandwidth, the only meaning GB could hold, would be the old base2 one. - BitBurner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Valve PWNS U
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yeah, that's a lot of bandwidth. However, probably all of that is from paying customers. IMHO Steam has really curbed illegal copying and put dollars back into the distributor's and author's hands. And the bandwidth usage is just the cost of doing business.
- Meowmix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@osiriscky3 : Steam is an online retailer. If anything, I hope they do get wind of it, think it's p2p and try to shut them down. That would be the funniest court battle since Microsoft sued Apple (pick one, any one).
I'd never heard of steam before, but I'm going to buy darwinia one I get home. ^_^ - pureeville, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0More than 2gbit certainly. Things have evolved since 1995.
- LeFrenzy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1a little bit more and it's going to be 1337TB...that would be mad l33t. ;D
- vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Oops my last post was worded wrong. Bandwidth is incorrect in that context. Line rate is usually in base10 or sometimes a mixed (1024 x 1000) format, but the ammount of transfer is always base2.
Are we confused yet? - isewise, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That makes Steam like the most undigg affect website ever!
- TheWorkz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Would be interesting to see how much Google Uses between all of their services... Adsense, video, gmail.. probably more than that!
- diggnationdevon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have had problems with Steam in the past, but it seems to work well ever since I got Half-Life 2 last year. I'm lovin' CS-Source
- UnlivedPhalanx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Insane, I love Steam. Proving that not everything you download has to be porn or photoshop hacks.
- SatansMagicHat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Steam has almost crossed the 1000TB mark of bandwidth usage on their Steam service using 100 million gigabytes or almost 9 765.625 terabytes! Would anyone like to foot that transfer bill - thats a LOT of downloads!"
I like how the link lists none of those numbers... - johnsto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0avonej: stop being daft. CS:S and CS are both hugely popular. Some people prefer one over another, be it for performance reasons or the gameplay differences. At least they still have the choice and both games are still actively supported with bug fixes and improvements each month. Obviously though, CS:S is a current product and hence recieves additional content, but the original has a huge library of mods and maps and models and addon packs built by the community. The 'split' is really just a gap between two evolutions of the same game. It's an evolving community and will continue to be until the oft-promised "CS beater" arrives.
- Sh|fty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Steam uses content servers to let users download updates to there games (and full games).
59 Of these content servers are owned and run by valve the rest are run by ISP and gaming networks. No Steam doesn't use a Bit Torrent like protocol at all they use these content servers.
You can view more info about them here,
http://steampowered.com/status/content_servers.html
Note the amount of bandwidth they can and do use, this goes up and is maxed out when an update to a game or an update to the steam client is released. - johnsto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Valve have their main content servers in Washington which are automatically mirrored to hundreds of local sites across the world (note the sponsored adverts that shown when you get new content). So presumably this is the total if you add them all up. Each Steam user is probably responsible for two or three GiB of that.
- JamesBond, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Their servers must occupy the entire state of WA. Okay not really but they must have some serious amount of land to store their servers for it to run smoothly most of the time.
- sirmasterboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0like 25GB is from me, seeing as i have downloaded all thoes HL-2 GCF's like 5 times.
- TC-14, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0its actually 1MB = 1024KB with most operating systems, unless we are talking about hardware companies, which tend use 1MB = 1000KB, probably to make it seem the capacity of the hard disk is greater than what it actually is.
- vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0soccerbob -
T3? Please tell me you are kidding. Try more like an OC48 just to (almost) cover the average usage.
People that dont know what they are talking about really should just keep their mouths shut. - Ramble, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Might I remind everyone that a gigabyte is a unit of measurement using base-10, not base-2.
Or, for all the idiots, it goes up evenly, A.K.A, 1 megabyte = 1000 kilobytes, 1 gigabyte = 1000 megabytes.
Using these numbers probabily comes up a bit shorter than 1000TB. - EDantzer, on 10/12/2009, -0/+0NerveBand said "Holy *****...then again..yahoo uses more since it is the most visited site in the world."
- nogami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0daem0nx: No, steam doesn't use any form of bittorrent (at least as far as clients uploading data to other clients goes). All data comes directly from one of Valve's hosted servers.
Please check your facts next time. - vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0crapiolio -
In 10 years? I've had one for two years now. Six 200GB drives in RAID 5. Where have you been?
Even in a laptop, it should be less than 5 years until it is possible (I would doubt mainstream, or even common though) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0BitTorrent creator joins Valve - Ferrago
http://www.ferrago.com/story/2963 - tawker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ok, is it that hard to see the "almost" - It's not quite there.
As for the person who called it a dupe, duplicate story check didn't give me anything, I wonder if it was a bug in digg but it didn't show up as a duplicate story. - BitBurner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0 Vuke I get you..
Base2= 0-1 (binary)
Base10= 0-9 (how we count)
We "say" a base10 number (1024) to describe a Base2 amount.
Here is a little something on the GiB thing.
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=136 - DeputyDawg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I signed up for Steam a few days ago to get a legitimate copy of Half Life 2 and so far I've downloaded over 6 gigs from them. That's only half of all the content I bought!
- johnsto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0m1t0s1s: Bram Cohen has since left Valve. He was only there for a short time I believe (he spoke about this in a recent interview after BitTorrent recieved that insane amount of funding)
- txrat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ya.... like when a 40gb hd shows up as 35gb
someone stole my 5gb! - splitsixty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"There have been a total of 50 billion player minutes in our multiplayer games since the start of the year. If a single person sat down to play on their own, it would take 2.28 million years to accomplish this. This is assuming that you're not planning on sleeping during this 2 million year stretch."
Coffee anyone? - astrotrain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0
Not only the RIAA getting their grubby hands into this but the millions of Spyware creators and
ppl using IE:
"You have 50,000 instances of Spyware on your system" - rnelsonee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Um, Google calculator didn't make a mistake -- the poster somehow thought that "9 765" somehow equalled 1,000.
10M GB (from the article) = 9.54 PB. Done. -
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