What I don't understand is why Steam and others don't use a torrent-like protocol on their back-end to reduce their bandwidth requirements large numbers of customers downloading the game at the same time. Back in the day WOW used used it for distributing large patches it seems to be a solved problem.
Downloading the game wasn't a problem for anyone, as far as I know the CDN held up fine. The problem was the steam storefront, i.e. actually buying the game.
This makes sense because there are several live service games on steam that have hundreds of thousands of active players - any update will put a large instantaneous load on the CDN as all the clients are forced to update at the same time, and this happens extremely frequently so they've had to get good at handling it.
What doesn't happen very frequently is hundreds of thousands of people trying to buy a game at exactly the same time, because most games have pre-orders.
Why then does Path of Exile (especially the new 2, which is only 1-2 steps in popularity below Silksong right now on SteamDB) bothers with still including a predownload torrent on every big update ?
The PoE torrent is for their own distribution of their game (as opposed to Steam/Epic, with which the torrent can't be used) - I imagine Grinding Gear's own distribution stack is not as robust as the big ol' platforms.
In an interview, Gabe commented on his very question. Answer was that this involves a bunch of technical complexity vs just spending money on the problem. Steam also has such an enormous library now vs a single game company that you are still going to be mostly dependent on a few huge seeders.
i mean on the one hand yeah on the other its not that big of a technical problem. having one game vs hundreds well torrent trackers have been doing that since forever, and yeah you would need super seeders but isnt that still less load than have to run a http or upt based download server?
For any P2P protocols to work, including BitTorrent, you need to be able to access the other nodes. In today's world, that's becoming harder because everyone and their granny are gradually being hidden behind a strict CGNAT.
