Steam Downloads

[Paragon Fury]

Is it just me or does Steam have the WORST download time of any of the "Game Services" regularly used? (IE: Origin, Curse, Battle.net, Gamestop's Downloader etc.)

It regularly takes days and hours for me download things that at most would take a day from another service. IE: When I pre-loaded Battlefield 4 from Origin, a 24GB game, it took maybe 16 hours total. Now I'm trying to download Call of Duty: Ghosts from Steam and the estimate time is 3 days for a 28GB campaign. That isn't even counting the separate 24GB Multiplayer download. The 10GB patch for BF4 took maybe 4-5 hours tops? Guild Wars 2 downloaded in its entirety from GS in my 12 hour workday when I installed it.

This isn't the first time I've had this problem with Steam either. It took me like a week straight to install the games I got from the Summer Sale (Sleeping Dogs, Metro Last Light, New Vegas).

My Download Region is set to the area closest to me (New York. Next closest would be Boston) and the download speed is uncapped. But it keeps jumping among "Not Downloading at all" to only 100KB/S to sometimes 400KB/S, mainly staying at 100KB/S.

Sure I'll eventually get my game; at the end of the freaking week while not being able to play anything else online.

(And yes I already have gone through my router settings)

 

[shrekfan246]

It's a bit rubbish, and fluctuates greatly to be sure, but I've not had that kind of trouble with it and I'm in roughly the same server area (I may be on Boston, not sure which I'm closer to and don't care to check at the moment). Steam is actually slightly faster than most other forms of downloading I've used over the past three years, but I wish they'd implement the ability to manually alter the maximum speed allowed. I like to watch Youtube videos or something while downloading, but Steam hogs all of the bandwidth which causes the download speed to fluctuate like a soundwave and keeps Youtube from buffering. Obnoxious.

But no, it hasn't been that bad for me. Steam will download one GB approximately ten minutes quicker than Xbox Live or the Playstation Network or even Mozilla Firefox/Google Chrome on my internet. Sorry to hear you're having such big problems with it, the usefulness of the program seems to vary greatly by user I've noticed.

 

[josemlopes]

I contantly download stuff at 10Mb/s on Steam, it is really dependent on where you live.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I've never really had this problem, steam downloads quite fast for me, and in fact downloads either at about the same speed, or slightly faster than other PC game downloading services, and something like ten times faster than XBox Live or PSN.

In any case, are you sure the problem isn't the times that you're downloading your games? You mentioned downloading CoD Ghosts, and games you bought during the summer sale. Don't you think that those are times when TONS of other people are also downloading those exact same games? It might be less steam's fault and more a problem of there just being more stress than average on the servers during those times.

 

[Caiphus]

It tends to fluctuate for me, for no apparent reason. I was getting 500kb/s earlier, which is rather bad, and 2.5Mb/s right now, which is pretty damn awesome for where I live.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

Depends on your connection and if you have something else downloading at the same time, or someone else using the connection, since from experience Steam just chokes the connection while it downloads something.

 

[GoaThief]

I like to watch Youtube videos or something while downloading, but Steam hogs all of the bandwidth which causes the download speed to fluctuate like a soundwave and keeps Youtube from buffering. Obnoxious.

Obnoxious? Seems pretty common for any kind of download service. Besides, are you sure it's just not a case of ignorance?

Settings > Downloads > Set bandwidth cap

Could use a third party program too.

;-)

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

It tends to fluctuate for me, for no apparent reason. I was getting 500kb/s earlier, which is rather bad, and 2.5Mb/s right now, which is pretty damn awesome for where I live.

Damm, 2.5? the most I get is 1.8, which isn't too bad considering where I live.

I expect it'll get better once the fibre really gets laid down.

 

[Caiphus]

Damm, 2.5? the most I get is 1.8, which isn't too bad considering where I live.

I expect it'll get better once the fibre really gets laid down.

2.5 is pretty much the tippity top that we get. This is close to Central Auckland, which I assume is about as good as it gets? I don't know where you live. Of course I do

Who knows when we'll get fibre. My internet provider says mid 2015. Which is disappointing; I thought it'd be earlier than that.

But yeah, now that exams are over, I'm downloading games like a ************.

 

[DanielBrown]

Uuuh. I download at 6-8mb/s with my new router. Before that I downloaded at 1mb/s, which was incredibly fast for me.
Living in Stockholm, Sweden, if that has anything to do with it.

 

[lapan]

It actually has pretty great downloadtimes.

You can switch download regions, so if my default region has bandwidth problems i usually just switch to some small eastern european country and have a great bitrate again.

 

[Battenberg]

When you say any game service do you mean strictly game services for the PC? Because as much as I love my PS3 the download times for updates are horrendous enough, never mind downloading full games from the PSN store, some of which have taken me 12+ hours in the past.

As far as Steam goes I can't say I've noticed it being any slower than, for example, Origin or the GOG downloader however my laptop is pretty out of date and takes ages to do anything so I don't keep a close eye on it when it is downloading. Although I have noticed that the constant stream of TF2 updates seem to take a very long time however that could just be a TF2 issue rather than a Steam issue.

 

[Altorin]

28gb? yeah, we're *totally* ready for full cloud gaming

OT: i rarely have an issue with steam, but the biggest game I downloaded recently was Xcom at 13gb, still managed to do it in less then 10 hours

 

[Lawnmooer]

Steam is a bit weird...

But I don't have too many problems with it.

I live in the UK, so my closest download region is London, but I find that if I have issues with it that I actually do get much better bitrate from setting my region to Germany (Not sure if it's to do with strain on the London servers or just German stuff being more efficient...)

So, if you're having issues with speed, I'd recommend checking out some other regions as it could be possible that your closest one might not be the quickest (As it appears to be in my case)

 

[yamy]

I've never had problem with downloading on Steam here in the UK. Consistently hits the speed cap for my 60M internet plan (7.5 MB/s)

 

[dementis]

I think it may be where you live because it takes me half an hour to download a 20GB game. I started downloading Arkham Origins, went to make a cup of tea and some crumpets, by the time I'd finished that and went upstairs the download was at around 65% and after another 10 minutes or so it was done.

 

[Revolutionary]

Yeah I live in Australia and it really varies. Sometimes I get up to 5Mbps, other times it crawls at 30Kbps. For the most part though I don't really have any problems, it usually only happens if i'm tying to download a game that's been on sale recently.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Steam has a poor connection? Never had that issue. In fact, getting a game from Steam is one of very few opportunities I have to download at pretty much the maximum speed my connection is capable of. It's extremely satisfying to see 10MB/s (yes, it's an uppercase B) on anything and even 15GB games don't take that long to install.

 

[nat_401]

Never had any issues like the OP, the download speed fluctuates at times but its usually fine, 12.5MB/S is the highest I can reasonably expect but 10MB/S is probably the average, and that's with 3 other people online at the time, don't think the problem is at steams end.