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‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

(www.forbes.com)
400 points redbell | 2 comments | 06 Aug 23 15:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.019s | source
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yownie ◴[06 Aug 23 18:54 UTC] No.37025300[source]▶
The title of this article is essentially meaningless.

BG3 is single player offline game, mainly distributed globally through Steam (and GOG) which runs it's own CDN for games. There is a multiplayer mode but that is co-ordinated via p2p for the most part.

The "IT team" at Larian doesn't get hit with those downloads as they only send a single copy up to Steam's CDN which handles the traffic (perhaps some backend user authentication too?)

so essentially this article is "Baldur's Gate 3, is a very popular download on Steam" just buzz to push more sales presumably.

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1. 59nadir ◴[06 Aug 23 19:18 UTC] No.37025536[source]▶
I searched for "multiplayer" here just to see if maybe I was mistaken about this game; number of players is not a super meaningful stressor on a system when you're not providing a whole slew of live services and simulation, so I was wondering what the point of mentioning the 700k user count was.

700k players when you:

- Don't run your own game update distribution/patcher

- Don't provide real-time chat

- Don't run your own arbitration (what's the point if mostly everything is P2P/high trust sessions and cooperative?)

- ...

700k players is great for them and by all accounts they seem to have done a great job overall, but it's a far cry from League of Legends or even DotA2 in terms of system stress.

replies(1): >>37028242 #
2. strken ◴[06 Aug 23 23:52 UTC] No.37028242[source]▶
Even if you're just doing NAT holepunching and orchestrating some P2P sessions, if you get 700% of your expected load and still stay online then good for you.