Steam makes Improvements to downloads

GAMING ON DEMAND network Steam has made some improvements to its content delivery and promised that from now on downloading and publishing will be a swift breeze.

"Over the years, Steam has delivered a lot of bits to a lot of people. Delivering content is really at the core of Steam, and we have been working on improving that core," it said in a blog post published on Friday.

"As of today, you can download some of the content on Steam using all-new server and client code to get the job done."

The updated content system has been tailored to speed things up for all parties using Steam, according to the post, and while users will be able to download their content quicker, regardless of where they are geographically, so too will developers enjoy a speed boost.

"The new content system is designed to do two things: deliver better download rates in more places around the world, and also to simply streamline the publishing process on Steam, ultimately making it possible to ship more games than we would have been able to with the old system," the firm added.

Because Steam has increased the aggregate bandwidth of the system it should be better placed to respond to peaks in demand, like when a new game comes out, the firm explained.

It has enabled this in two ways - the use of more "firewall friendly" HTTP for sending content, and much smaller download packages.

"With the Steam content system that's been in place for a few years now, if an individual file on disk were modified by a game update, your client had to download the whole file," it said.

"That can be painful when the file in question is really large. The new system supports delivering only the differences between the old and new files, meaning game updates will be much smaller overall."

New features will follow these improvements, such as download scheduling and - alarmingly - bandwidth throttling.

The system is currently in trial mode, but interested users are offered a large trailer to download as a test. µ