Comment by mococa
7 hours ago
Steam & Blizzard (probably others) used to delivery games through torrent protocol in the past, before CDNs became cheaper.
When StarCraft 2 was lauched, the installer (before Battle.net installer crapware) had a complete graphical visualization of seeders & leechers.
Reference: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
Oh, story time:
Once I was using Blizzard's downloader to install something (StarCraft, Diablo, I don't remember), and it was kinda slow. I disabled P2P downloads and speed skyrocketed, and I said "Huh, this was unexpected".
When P2P downloads disabled you could see the list of CDNs you're downloading from and mine had a single IP on that list. It looked familiar. Then it dawned on to me. It was the Akamai server which we were hosting in our system room, at 15 minutes of driving distance. After a chuckle, I went to get a cup of tea, because that was entertaining than the game itself.
Then of course, I dived into whatever I was installing that night.
Edit: From the screenshots in the wiki, I remembered that the progress bar was red. It was possibly Diablo 3, then. However, I'm still not 100% sure about it.
I've worked at trading firms where the "reference data master" file is usually a big json or equivalent.
To get the file out to 100s or 1000s of machine they would often use private bittorent to distribute the file out.
I've seen this used for distributing container images in networks with awkward network topologies (e.g. a lot of bandwidth within a site or sub-site but limited bandwidth to central registries)
Same here. Inspired by both, I used to delivery videos over torrent to in door machines since at that time, there's no CDNs (or it was difficult to get one).
As a private network, they have the option of multicast.
When I retire and/or get "F You" money, I'm going to publicly tell a story about multicast, bittorrent and "not invented here" syndrome.
Steam has a limited form of p2p delivery, used on LANs: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE...
Several companies tried this for distributing software.
It was very controversial. Users were angry that software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software. Made a lot of people angry.
>software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software
If I understand the description correctly, microsoft still does this!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-...
Steam still does this! For your local network only and not using the torrent protocol.
If only Blizzard servers were seeders, and clients were only leechers, that'd have not been a problem.
This is less efficient (in bandwidth, complexity, and monetary cost) than an HTTPS based CDN.
There’s web seeding
Typical example to show that people who want to be angry will be angry, even for pointless things.
As someone who was annoyed by it at the time, I don't think it's a good example of that.
This was in an era of much more limited upstream bandwidth. The p2p nature was obscured from non-technical users in some implementations. So on and so on. I'm sure there are plenty of writeups from that era detailing why it was a bad idea.
These companies already used capable CDNs to distribute patches. It was a way for them to shift their CDN bill onto their paying customers.
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