Because so many people are stuck at home right now, the amount of players gaming online is pretty incredible. The current COVID-19 pandemic has had the unintended side effect of giving people a lot of time to play a lot of games. It’s also had the, also unintended and unfortunate, side effect of putting a lot of stress on servers. Sony has had to slow down download speeds on PSN, Microsoft’s Xbox services are getting stretched to the limit, and we’ve seen Xbox Live and Switch Online crash a few times. Now, Valve are making their own moves to alleviate issues you may have playing on Steam.
In a blog post, Valve outlined how they will schedule downloads now to optimize stress on bandwidth. They will spread updates over the course of several days, with games that haven’t been played over several days not being updated immediately. Considering how many people are on Steam right now, this is probably good move. You can read more about it through here.
This is one of many moves that several companies have done to make those isolated at home more comfortable and with the best possible accessibility to their entertainment in these trying times.