Steam will no longer crash if you own over 25,000 games

Frubeling said:
And yet I have two 1 terabyte drives completely filled with maybe 30 games. Mysterious
You're killing your own argument by assuming that having a lot of shovelware and ancient games means having few to no large install games
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No. I'm understanding what an average is. I'm understanding what a possibility is. I'm not assuming that a collection of 25,000 games from Steam will absolutely definitely fit in 100TB, that it's impossible for it not to happen.

You're assuming (and I neither know nor care why) that it's impossible for a collection of 25,000 games from Steam to contain a very high proportion of games with a (by modern standards) small or very small install size. Your own collection of games is irrelevant to a collection of 25,000 games. As I said before:

Angilion said:
Few if any people with a normal modern game library would have an average game size of 4GB or less. But we're not talking about anyone with a normal modern game library. We're talking about people with 25,000 games from Steam. That would have to include many pieces of asset flip dross, many small indie games and many older games. Many of those would be far under 4GB, which would significantly reduce the average game size.

For example, the first game in my Steam library when sorted alphabetically is Avadon: The Black Fortress. Space taken on disc is 114.73 MB. Some games that size and a 50GB game would average 4GB per game.
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I'm fairly sure it would be possible to select 25,000 games from Steam that had an average installation size of 4GB.
 
Angilion said:
No. I'm understanding what an average is. I'm understanding what a possibility is. I'm not assuming that a collection of 25,000 games from Steam will absolutely definitely fit in 100TB, that it's impossible for it not to happen.
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Man I think you've taken "not a chance" way too literally here. I don't mean there's literally no feasible way that could happen, just that it's highly improbable
 
Frubeling said:
Man I think you've taken "not a chance" way too literally here. I don't mean there's literally no feasible way that could happen, just that it's highly improbable
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If you say one thing and then stand by it, I can't know you really meant to say something completely different.

I also disagree with your new position. Perhaps the difference is down to you only playing recent big budget games. That must be the case if the average size of games in your library is about 65GB. Perhaps it's also partly a reflection of how long we've each been gaming on a general purpose computer. I go back to 1981 with that, which probably gives me a different experience to you when it comes to game installation size. So I go back to the earliest days of games being installed (as opposed to being read off a tape or disc each time). HDD capacity was in the tens of MB (my first PC had a 20MB HDD and a 40MB HDD, which was high end at that time) so few people were in the market for games that installed at all. Drive sizes increased quite slowly to begin with, so the earliest installed games were a few MB. Even when some games passed 10MB in size, a HDD still wasn't assumed and games still had to fit on 1.44MB floppy discs because that's what most of the potential market had. "Insert disc x of y" is something gamers my age will remember (unless they only played on consoles). That continued for quite some time, albeit scaled up with optical discs replacing floppies and HDDs slowly increasing to hundreds of MB and then a few GB. It wasn't very long ago that almost all PC games fitted on a single 700MB CD and those that didn't came on a few CDs.

I'll add up the installation size of the first 20 games in my Steam library to give a comparison. Sorted by alphabetical order, so it's probably at least roughly representative. 78.4GB. So an average of just under 4GB per game. I didn't pick those games for their small size. Nor are they the smallest games in my library - they're just the 1st 20 by alphabetical order in the active playlist part of my library, i.e. those that I haven't marked as games I don't want to play or don't want to play again after finishing them. Not all of them are under 4GB. Quite a few aren't. The biggest is Borderlands GOTY edition at 18.64GB. But more are smaller, some much smaller. The smallest one is Avernum 5 at 88MB.

I don't have anywhere near 25,000 games. Probably more like 200. A larger library would have to contain a lot of very small (in terms of installation size) games. I think it's more likely than "highly improbable" that the average installation size could be below 4GB. There just aren't that many modern big budget games with huge installation sizes.

Off on a tangent, I doubt if anyone actually has 25,000 games from Steam. Several people (including me) have pointed out that some of the gameplay stats given on Steam are wildly implausible, requiring someone to have dozens of games running simultaneously 24/7 for years. I doubt if the number of games stat is completely reliable either.
 
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Spunkynuts said:
A youngster then... I remember watching the tape decks on the BBC Micro loading up Football Manager - buying Ian Rush for £50,000 - It was so much better when I was a lad!
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I remember learning Sinclair Basic in 1981 by typing in programs for the ZX-81 that were printed in magazines like Your Sinclair. I inevitably made some mistakes and finding and understanding those mistakes was part of how I learned Sinclair Basic, followed by modifying the code, seeing if the changes did what I thought they would do and working out why not if they didn't. Although that knowledge didn't stop me doing the traditional "my first programming" of going into Woolworths and entering:

10 PRINT "Woolworths Sucks"
20 GOTO 10

into the demonstration ZX Spectrum when it came out.

I also remember labouring on a farm for 6 weeks in order to save enough money to buy a ZX Spectrum. I was 13. I doubt if that would be allowed nowadays.

As I said, I go back to 1981 with gaming on a general purpose computer. But this is about games being installed, which didn't happen that far back. There was nothing for them to be installed to. I think hard drives existed back then, but definitely not for home use. They were serious high end kit for advanced business use, way beyond home use and nowhere near being targetted by the nascent game industry.

I didn't have a BBC. Did you do azimuth adjustment on the tape deck with them? It was quite common on the Spectrum. Tiny screwdriver in a hole in the tape deck, minutely adjusting the angle of the tape head to get the best reading. Different tapes might work better with different tape head angles. With experience, you could tell if a game would load successfully by listening to the squealing as the data on the tape was read as audio.


2m30s was a very quick loading time in those days, even for such a simple game.

One of the momemtoes I've kept from my childhood, from a couple of years later in my Spectrum days, was the hardware for an early form of DRM - Lenslok. A passcode would be displayed onscreen in a highly distorted way and a cheap plastic lens that came in the box with the game cassette and manual would distort it back to legibility when you folded it and put it on the screen. Theoretically. It didn't work very well in practice.
 
Angilion said:
I remember learning Sinclair Basic in 1981 by typing in programs for the ZX-81 that were printed in magazines like Your Sinclair. I inevitably made some mistakes and finding and understanding those mistakes was part of how I learned Sinclair Basic, followed by modifying the code, seeing if the changes did what I thought they would do and working out why not if they didn't. Although that knowledge didn't stop me doing the traditional "my first programming" of going into Woolworths and entering:

10 PRINT "Woolworths Sucks"
20 GOTO 10

into the demonstration ZX Spectrum when it came out.

I also remember labouring on a farm for 6 weeks in order to save enough money to buy a ZX Spectrum. I was 13. I doubt if that would be allowed nowadays.

As I said, I go back to 1981 with gaming on a general purpose computer. But this is about games being installed, which didn't happen that far back. There was nothing for them to be installed to. I think hard drives existed back then, but definitely not for home use. They were serious high end kit for advanced business use, way beyond home use and nowhere near being targetted by the nascent game industry.

I didn't have a BBC. Did you do azimuth adjustment on the tape deck with them? It was quite common on the Spectrum. Tiny screwdriver in a hole in the tape deck, minutely adjusting the angle of the tape head to get the best reading. Different tapes might work better with different tape head angles. With experience, you could tell if a game would load successfully by listening to the squealing as the data on the tape was read as audio.


2m30s was a very quick loading time in those days, even for such a simple game.

One of the momemtoes I've kept from my childhood, from a couple of years later in my Spectrum days, was the hardware for an early form of DRM - Lenslok. A passcode would be displayed onscreen in a highly distorted way and a cheap plastic lens that came in the box with the game cassette and manual would distort it back to legibility when you folded it and put it on the screen. Theoretically. It didn't work very well in practice.
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Ha what a great read.

I remember walking to the local computer shop with my dad and buying the 1K RAM pack for the ZX80 (I think that's right, it was a while ago!).

The Spectrum was fantastic when it arrived. I remember also entering the game code in order to play a game. The only one I can remember doing was a version of Tempest.

I still have one Spectrum possession from back then, Daley Thompson Decathlon :)
 
Nate75 said:
Ha what a great read.

I remember walking to the local computer shop with my dad and buying the 1K RAM pack for the ZX80 (I think that's right, it was a while ago!).
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I don't know. The first computer I saw was a ZX-81. Mine had the optional 16KB RAM pack that plugged into a slot on the back. But the RAM pack was narrow, cheaply made and very high, at least 5 times the height of the computer itself, so it was prone to wobbling a bit and that would crash the computer. It was a feature not a bug - it taught users to be careful with a computer and it was a form of typing training as it required the user to limit how much force they used when typing :)

I recall that there was a ZX-80 but I don't remember anything about it. I have a vague impression that it was very similar to the ZX-81 that came after it and that the ZX-81 was to some extent a ZX-80 that was cheaper to make and therefore something Sinclair could sell to a much larger market.

The Spectrum was fantastic when it arrived.
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Oh aye, it was. I thought that working on a farm for 180 hours when I was 13 was well worth it. Sound! Colour! Hi res graphics! 48KB! Wow!

One of my coworkers who's a similar age to me told me about showing his child Spectrum games when they were little. His kid thought it was very funny that their dad had played such primitive games with blocky crude graphics and bleeping noises. The rate of change in computer games in that time was remarkable.

I remember also entering the game code in order to play a game. The only one I can remember doing was a version of Tempest.
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Lenslok was wildly unpopular and its use was dropped quickly, after only a small number of games. IIRC the only game I had with it was Elite.

I still have one Spectrum possession from back then, Daley Thompson Decathlon :)
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And how many broken joysticks? :) Wiggle wiggle snap!

I had Daley Thompson's Decathalon as well, though not any more. I think that was the sports game that was hilariously bugged. Race timers looped and there wasn't any range checking on the results, so if you ran to close to the finish line then stopped and waited for the timer to loop before rushing over the finish line you could finish the race with a time of a second or two and score a vast number of points. The high jump only checked if you hit the bar, so if you jumped under it that counted as clearing it. :)


I'm going to look up the ZX-80...I was roughly right. The two were so similar that the ZX-81 was essentially a ZX-80 with some very minor improvements and with the hardware simplified to reduce manufacturing costs but with the same functionality. You could turn a ZX-80 into a ZX-81 by changing a ROM chip. So that RAM pack you remember would have been a mighty 16KB, not 1KB. Both machines shipped with 1KB.

Heh...1KB. Seems silly now. My cheap microwave oven probably has thousands of times as much memory.
 
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