Games

Well… Not to take away any points from Valve because it’s still a big chunk of infrastructure, but this made me pause… I think steam content is arguably easier to serve than something like Netflix. Netflix has to deal with encoding content and it’s important for streams to not buffer, so it has to consistently stream data at a decent rate (if steam hiccups it sucks, but it’s not a problem where you’re interrupted mid game, at least). Games can be a lot bigger than videos, but I’m not sure how much that matters for this. Storage is relatively cheap and Netflix will probably have multiple copies of each video in different codecs and bitrates which might make it more equivalent storage wise? Per hour of entertainment my guess is that Netflix actually has to send more data over the network than steam on average. There’s plenty of smaller games, and people can often spend hundreds of hours in a single game. If somebody rewatches a show they’ll stream it again, but if they replay a game they might still have a copy downloaded…

I don’t know any of the actual details, but I’m curious now how they actually compare! I’d guess Netflix probably has twice as many active users as steam, and I’d guess Netflix uses more bandwidth per user than steam (I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it was 10x as much… I think people could easily stream 50gb per day, and I maaaaybe download that much from steam in a couple of weeks on average). Would be curious how it actually works out!

This isn’t to say steam is free to host, it obviously isn’t, I just think Netflix might be harder. I’m a tiny bit worried about Steam’s back catalog long term, eventually it may not be deemed profitable to keep hosting old games “for free”. Like eventually if nobody is buying a game anymore, but people keep downloading it, it couuuuld technically cost steam more to host than they made off of it, and maintaining storage long term costs money too (though hopefully this keeps getting less expensive over time). The margins for Valve are super high, though, so hopefully it doesn’t matter!