Right now we have about 60 Steam content servers running around the world. They are throttled to 100 Mbps, but can handle ~800 Mbps if necessary. In terms of network bandwidth, we're currently running at 4 Gbps, and will boost to 7 Gbps when we start pre-loading. We have the option of increasing that to 14 Gbps with a phone call (admittedly a really expensive phone call). Since Half-Life 2 is ~2 GB (or 16 Gb) over the wire, we can serve up about a person/second with a complete copy of the game. These are idealized numbers - the real capacity planning numbers are quite a bit lower. So pre-loading is a good thing, being able to play before you have a complete copy of the game is a good thing, and having buckets and buckets of bandwidth is a good thing. It's interesting that videogames in addition to being a larger aggregate audience than almost any TV show (and a lot of countries total Internet traffic) are also now becoming one of the largest consumers of bandwidth on the net. I'm curious if people know of other single applications consuming more than 10 Gbps.
Age of Chivalry - Age of Chivalry is a first person medieval online game being developed by Team Chivalry, you must own a copy of a source based game (HL2, TF2, DOD:S, CSS, L4D etc.) and have an active account on steam to play. The game itself is entirely free, so why not check us out on steam! (808 hits) System Shock on Steam - after two decades, Nightdive Studios is rebooting and re-imagining the original System Shock (722 hits)