Steam Infrastructure and Traffic Analysis

Member： Christoff Visser, Romain Fontugne

Category: Exploring

Tags: Steam, gaming, network monitoring, traffic analysis

• Background：
  • In the era of 100+ GB video games, new game releases and updates can cause significant traffic spikes on the Internet.
• Purpose：
  • Understanding the traffic patterns and infrastructure of video game distributors can help network operators to better manage their networks and plan for future capacity upgrades.
• Approach：
  • Collect data: we collect data from Steam, one of the largest video game distributors, to analyze the traffic patterns and infrastructure.
  • Analyze traffic: we analyze the traffic patterns to understand the impact of new game releases and updates on the network.
  • Share insights: we share our findings with the community to help network operators better manage their networks.

Exploring Steam Infrastructure and Traffic Patterns

The Steam platform is one of the largest video game distributors in the world, with millions of users downloading games, updates, and patches every day. The traffic generated by Steam can have a significant impact on network operators, especially during new game releases or major updates. We explore the infrastructure and traffic patterns of Steam to better understand the network requirements and challenges associated with video game distribution and the impact on network operations. We collect data from publicly available Steam APIs and analyze the traffic patterns to identify trends and anomalies.

Below is some of the findings from our study. More information, including a copy of our paper, can be found here. We also provide an interactive site with live data available: Steam Download Statistics

Some findings studing the impact of new Game Releases