Valveis one of PC gaming’s longest running services, and as such, is constantly looking for ways to improve its products and platform. Ahead of the next year’s launch of the Steam Deck,Valveappears to be investing in new technology that should improve download speeds on its devices.
In recent weeks, Valve has been making a plethora of moves in advancing its platform. For starters,Valve announced that Steam Deck developer toolsdo not require an actual dev kit, opening up the possibilities of users who can actually create content for the device. Similarly, Valve and Microsoft came to a licensing agreement regarding the former’s Havok engine and modding, giving more accessibility to certain modding teams. Lastly, and perhaps disappointingly, Valve delayed the Steam Deck by two months citing problems with its global supply chain in actually manufacturing devices, an ongoing problem in the video game industry over the past two years.
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A new Valve patent suggests the company is working to improve the way content downloads are handled on its devices. The patent, titled “Efficient File-Delivery Techniques,” was filed back in May of 2020, and describes a new form of downloading content that prioritizes minimal file transferals, which in turn, willoptimize download timesand network bandwidth. Valve’s patent then is for a remote system that after receiving an update from a developer, “identifies which portions of the new version are new and which portions were present in previous versions,” and restructures the update to increase download efficency.
Take this scenario:The Witcher 3: Wild Huntreceives a major new update, with one user playing the game nonstop since its release, and another user coming back to it after a couple of years. The user who has been playing all this time will most likely have the most up-to-date version of the game, while the user who has not touched the game in a long time will have a very old version of the game. With the remote system detailed in Valve’s patent, despite being technically the same update model and version, each user will receive modified instructions to perform the update that will modify existing files and add new ones where necessary to improve download performance.
This development could be a game-changer in the way that updates are rolled out on the Steam platform. If the remote system can actually decrease the bandwidth being used in updating games, then that is a plus for any PC or Steam user. However, the patent simultaneously raises the question of whetherdevelopers are optimizing their updatesas much as they should—or rather, do developers have a responsibility of releasing the most refined versions of its updates as possible?Valve’s patent suggests that updates can sometimes be pretty inefficiently designed, making its remote system necessary.
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