The launch of PlayerUnknown’s Battelgrounds quadrupled Steam’s bandwidth utilization

In the hours earlier than the sport’s last check server replace, Steam’s whole bandwidth was sitting at round three,000 Gbps. When the replace went reside, nevertheless, that quantity almost tripled, to a peak of slightly below 10,000 Gbps.

Some time later, when the precise, full, last launch of model 1.zero occurred, the rise was even steeper. Almost immediately, whole bandwidth rose from 5,000 to 20,000 Gbps, earlier than lastly peaking at round 22,000 a couple of hours after full launch. Brendan Greene tweeted final night time with a useful graph to place all that in perspective.

Our bandwidth utilization on @steam_games for the @PUBATTLEGROUNDS 1.zero launch was fairly nuts! The first bump was the ultimate check server replace, the second is the 1.zero launch… pic.twitter.com/X2nykzWPUY

— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) December 21, 2017

An attention-grabbing takeaway from that graph is how a lot of the bandwidth utilization comes from Asia. In a recent podcast with H3H3 (summarised on Reddit), Brendan Greene stated that a full 60% of the sport’s playerbase comes from China, which accounts for the large orange sections of the graph. Trailing considerably are Europe and North America, with a handful of different areas making up the remainder of the bandwidth.