Possibly Rawne meant "broadband"? A lot of people in less well provisioned areas are stuck on dialup because it's just too expensive for themselves or the cable company to run a BB line out to them, and satellite broadband is still kinda pricey. You can still get a reasonable game over dial-up if all the textures etc are cached, you just can't use voice chat or download any extra stuff in a meaningful fashion. If you're on 56k, six gigabytes would take about ELEVEN DAYS to download, IF you do nothing else, AND the line doesn't drop after a few hours... which is a heck of a wait even if your connection call is free. If it's charged at, say, a super low 0.5p per minute, that's £77...Somonah said:
I think I already covered those two points... but let's reiterate.
* If the download is running slow, as in significantly below 2mbit/sec (which is not an uncommon thing to happen - as I said, Portal really dragged, and that was just from the stragglers who never previously played it grabbing it for free rather than the launch of a hotly anticipated AAA title) then it won't complete in the "off peak" period. Either you'll have to interrupt it with no good guarantee it won't just start over (AND wait most of an extra day before getting to play your paid-for game), or accept that hit to your bandwidth. And some people don't have this partitioning - I specifically went for this plan even though it wasn't the most affordable or that high a peaktime cap because I have a catch-up-TV streamer set to download in the offpeak time, and don't make superheavy data use of the internet other than that.
And, if it actually downloads from Steam without telling you, or you put the disc in and set it going automatically or whatever, trusting it to come off the disc, that's a sudden and unexpected lump of peak time usage (or unavoidable consumption of your 24/7 cap). Also, I would have to stay up to start it - or, having bought the game earlier in the day, on disc so I could start straight away... I'd feel cheated at then having to wait those long agonising hours until it can be safely started.
* My own internet speed isn't the issue, I haven't had to use anything less than 10mbit in quite a while - or at least, my mother's net (which I sometimes "borrow" from if I'm near my cap) will step down from 10 to 5 to 2.5 when you make heavy use of it in a short period, but you'd still be able to snag 6gb in ~3 hours even so. My own connection doesn't have heavy traffic shaping, just the "flexible" cap (ie you pay harsh overage fees but there's no upper limit). In clear conditions it will run at a fairly steady 13-ish Mbit, which is better than 1x DVD or 8x CDROM, and get you the game in about 90 minutes.
What instead I'm anticipating is huge SERVER load, which may bring speeds way down. I'm sure Steam has quite a good connection and some pretty beefy servers, but there's still a limit to what you can supply, and big "events" like this would create congestion even WITH some of the players installing from disc instead. If it was to fall to, say, 1.5 Mbit (single-speed CDROM), then the aforementioned longer-than-eight-hour download would result. That's peaktime usage I shouldn't have to be virtually/actually paying for, time spent waiting for a download when I could be playing, and an utter waste of a pressed DVD, the box it comes in, and the drive it was inserted into.
