• Semperverus@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    It makes perfect sense if you’re a systems engineer.

    Downloading games costs bandwidth.

    Steam services millions of customers daily.

    Valve, correctly, decided to do a bit of load-balancing by prioritizing updates by how recently and frequently you play them, and spreads them out.

    This is nicer to their systems, and its nicer to most people who don’t live alone and have to share internet with other human beings in their home (or at work).

    You’d think it would be no big deal, bandwidth is “infinite” and “free” in most peoples minds. But there is a maximum throughput, and there is a cost in energy, time, performance, and money.

    Load-balancing, people. It saves lives.

    • CallMeAnAI@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Counterpoint, I couldn’t give two fucks about a billion dollar companies bottom line and if you have bandwidth problems at home I don’t give a fuck and you can configure your client and router to deal with it.

      No reason in the world valve can’t do what my Xbox does.

      • brrt@sh.itjust.works
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        19 hours ago

        Unless they changed it in the last couple of months Xbox does the same thing. When I still had my XSX there were updates sitting idly in the queue all the time.

        And countercounterpoint this is also an environmental issue. Unless you don’t give a fuck about that either.

        • CallMeAnAI@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          It’s a configuration item.

          As for “environmental issue” 👌👍🤣 resorting to the edgiest of trivial cases in technology as a reason to not do something is absurd. A 25GB hit to a CDN over a month is nothing. At scale either.

          Name one other place you expect that level of efficiency. You expect that level of efficiency on Linux repos? What about general purpose desktop applications? I shouldn’t get an auto update because I haven’t opened an app?

          This is expected behavior in any package management application. If someone uses too much cut them off like you would any other repo.

          • _cryptagion [he/him]@anarchist.nexus
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            18 hours ago

            There is no Linux distribution that downloads updates immediately either. I don’t know if you’re ignorant, or just an idiot, but auto updates in Linux distros run on cron jobs, so the load would be balanced anyway because not everyone is in the same time zone. Same for consoles like your Xbox.

      • null@piefed.nullspace.lol
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        19 hours ago

        A billion dollar company giving 2 fucks about their bottom line is probably how they become a billion dollar company in the first place.