Starfield Owners Can Preload the Game As Early As This Week

Grimlakin said:
Traditional early access through most devs is days not years.
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I'm not talking about that kind of early access, which is a mere marketing strategy to get you to pay a premium. Actual early access games can remain there for many years. The problem is when the developer has no inclination to ever leave early access.
 
Brian_B said:
Apart from the label "Early Access", is there any other effect it has on a game?
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Early access games are not fully featured, they are literally games that are still in development. It varies how far they are from being complete, but if you already have a complete game there is not much reason to release it to early access at that point.
 
MadMummy76 said:
Early access games are not fully featured, they are literally games that are still in development. It varies how far they are from being complete, but if you already have a complete game there is not much reason to release it to early access at that point.
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I've played plenty of "early access" games where they were better off than many "released" games. I don't think it has a whole lot to do with development in many cases. Some, yes, but not all.

I think many devs/pubs do it because you get some differential listing in Steam - smaller pond so easier to stand out maybe? That, and there's absolutely no pressure to shift to major release -- you just run as Early Access, get what you can out of that, then when sales start to flag, you do your "Official" release and see another spike in sales.
 
Brian_B said:
I've played plenty of "early access" games where they were better off than many "released" games. I don't think it has a whole lot to do with development in many cases. Some, yes, but not all.
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You are allowed to enjoy an incomplete game. I have 500 hours in an early access title. That doesn't mean it is anywhere close to being a feature ready game.
Brian_B said:
I think many devs/pubs do it because you get some differential listing in Steam - smaller pond so easier to stand out maybe?
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That might be part of the reason for some devs, but it can be a two edged sword, some people actively avoid early access.
The real reason I believe is that they want income from the game before it is finished, and outside of crowdfunding the only other means of that is early access. With no strings attached, as there is no guarantee that an early access game will ever become what they promise.
Brian_B said:
That, and there's absolutely no pressure to shift to major release -- you just run as Early Access, get what you can out of that, then when sales start to flag, you do your "Official" release and see another spike in sales.
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That is exactly why many people don't trust early access games, when they do a fake release when enthusiasm and sales dwindle, and do a runner. Then a few months later the same company comes out with a new early access title without ever finishing the other one. This is what I meant by making it your business model. It's scummy.
 
I guess the thing to do is make sure you're getting early access to a game that has a developer with a proven track record...

You know... NOT star citizen.
 
Grimlakin said:
I guess the thing to do is make sure you're getting early access to a game that has a developer with a proven track record...

You know... NOT star citizen.
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That's what I usually have done and in the past, that amounted to maybe 1-3 but these days I'm not so sure anymore.
 
Grimlakin said:
I guess the thing to do is make sure you're getting early access to a game that has a developer with a proven track record...

You know... NOT star citizen.
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That's not really fair, Chris Roberts had plenty of games under his name then, it was only after the controversy surrounding star citizen started to grew when things came out about him that would've made people think twice about giving him money.
 
I seen an article on my phone earlier today that I can't seem to find now, but it stated that Steam users will be able to preload the game on the 30th.
 
Steam usually manages to saturate my max ISP bandwidth. GOG has surprised me a couple of times lately. Hardly ever use Epic and Rockstar even less.

Ironically NVIDIA has been more hit or miss when getting updates from them. Some times max speeds, some times looks like its locked to around 20-40 Mbps. It's pretty weird.
 
Grimlakin said:
To be fair... it's steam... I'm pretty sure they can meet the need.
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Yeah, nowadays they have decent speeds, but I remember years ago I was struggling to get even 10mbit out of their servers, I even had to switch to a different location in steam settings to get somewhat better download speeds.
 
MadMummy76 said:
Yeah, nowadays they have decent speeds, but I remember years ago I was struggling to get even 10mbit out of their servers, I even had to switch to a different location in steam settings to get somewhat better download speeds.
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I wouldn't be surprised if they have some region-specific limitations going on too.
 
MadMummy76 said:
Yeah, nowadays they have decent speeds, but I remember years ago I was struggling to get even 10mbit out of their servers, I even had to switch to a different location in steam settings to get somewhat better download speeds.
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Transfer speeds from Steam have been great as long as I have had FiOS:
- 35 Mbit/s full duplex (~2009-2011)
- 150 Mbit/s full duplex since (~2011-2017)
- 940/880 Mbit (marketed as Gigabit full duplex) since ~2017

In all of that time, I've been able to download games at something like 98% of my available local WAN bandwidth.

Been maxing out Steam downloads at ~117 MB/s since 2017.

I've been on Steam since close to the beginning (I didn't join immediately as I was happy with Counter-Strike on WON) but as soon as the Counter-Strike: Source / Half Life 2 bundle went live in early October 2004 I joined to buy it (Still the only time I've ever pre-ordered :p )

I can't remember how fast that first Steam download went, but as I recall they had a pre-download which they made available in tranches as the release date got closer, so maybe that helped alleviate download speed issues for that first one. This was the only Steam game I had for years after.

I honestly don't remember a time Steam has ever had anything but strangely impressive download speeds, though for many years there I probably didn't have the best internet connection to really challenge it. Internet didn't get good in my neck of the woods until Verizon brought FiOS here in 2009.
 
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Peter_Brosdahl said:
I wouldn't be surprised if they have some region-specific limitations going on too.
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I think they just didn't have any dedicated servers for Eastern Europe, and if you selected any EU country East of Germany they'd just put you on the Russian server. But we always had crap bandwidth towards Russia, understandably there is not much demand for Russian internet in Europe.

I had to select Belgium to get good speeds. But haven't had that issue in a while.
 
Very few companies host their own data any more - most all will hire a CDN to host it for them. The more you pay, the more geographical diversity and better bandwidth you get.

Steam doesn't use any single CDN, it could bounce between L3, Akamai, Cloudflare, etc. depending on where you are dialing in from, and they do have their own data centers for some hosting.

Everyone thought Apple was crazy when they invested big into Akamai back in 1999. Now CDNs own the internet.
 
I'd be curious to know how much of Steam's datacenters are colo's with their own hardware, or fully leased compute/bandwidth with a cloud provider.
 
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