Valve has recently announced that they are revamping their network infrastructure to handle increased amount of traffic on their social entertainment and gaming platform Steam. Valve has reportedly upgraded their network infrastructure with 100Gbps internet ports that will let them manage the growing traffic on Steam in an efficient way.
Apparently,the growth of traffic on Steam is increasing at the rate of 75 percent on a yearly basis and the platform has to handle around 450-500 petabytes of data every month. The current number of Steam users has already hit the 100 million mark and the platform records more than 10 million logins from concurrent players every day.
The previous network infrastructure was somewhat failing to keep up with this massive amount of growth and thus Valve decided to turn to Level 3 Communications to seek 100Gbps internet ports for their servers.
European people have recorded the maximum amount of bandwidth consumption on Steam. The bandwidth consumption on a normal day could be as high as 2.4Tbps with people in Europe accounting to fifty percent of the total consumption. The consumption experiences a massive amount of surge on special occasions like launching of a game.
A spokesperson for Valve stated that Level 3 Communications is one of the few providers that offers 100Gbps internet ports and the company is providing them with great help with their 100Gbps ports to handle the traffic growth in a proper manner.
The 100Gbps pipes from Level 3 Communications are currently available in 26 markets which are scattered over North America and Europe.
Mike Dunkle, the head of Valve’s Business Development Internet Infrastructure stated that revamping of the network with 100Gbps pipes would result in faster download speeds and lower latency during online gaming sessions.
The replacement of the previously used 10Gbps pipes with the new 100Gbps ones would also mean that the current number of players that log in to Steam on a daily basis will cause a lesser amount of congestion due to the massive capacity of the new pipes.
The upgradation process is already under way in Europe and with time, Valve plans to expand it over other parts of the continent and also the US.
Valve had decided to do away with Daily Deals and Flash Deals in their latest edition of Seasonal Sale on the Steam Store. The Daily Deals and Flash Deals have remained two of the most important selling techniques of the store for quite some time until it was finally removed in the latest Steam sale.
The decision proved to be beneficial for Valve as it reportedly made the Steam Winter sale a huge success. It was reported in a renowned website that the total revenue that the sale fetched for Valve amounted to a whopping $270 million. The biggest grossers of the Winter sale were Fallout 4 with a total earning of $13.9 and Grand Theft Auto with a total earning of $10.9 million.
This is nearly double the amount of revenue that Valve had earlier raked in with the Steam Summer Sale. The decision to remove the concepts of daily deals and flash deals was taken by keeping those customers in mind who do not get time to frequently visit the store during the 13-day sale period.
With the Winter sale, Valve introduced a new sales technique in which certain discounted prices for each game on sale was announced and the prices of these games remained same throughout the sales period.
The company stated that this helped attract a large number of customers as they were able to avail the same discounted price for any game on any of the days within the sale period.
This would not have been the case if the company went for its traditional method of daily deals and flash deals in which the discounts offered on the games would vary frequently. Valve further stated that the new method of sales allowed them to offer more number of games to customers per day.