[snackbroken]

Something I've been wondering for a while is if BitTorrent or other P2P protocols are ever a consideration for pushing game updates? Naively, it seems like an ideal fit since a large swarm of leechers quickly turns into a large swarm of (partial) seeders mostly chattering amongst themselves. I recall Facebook and Twitter used to internally torrent their updates in the 2010s and BT scales just fine to thousands of peers and tens of GB files at least, but I think I've only ever played one game whose updater was a torrent client so I'm guessing it's a nonstarter for one reason or another. Are game publishers just allergic to it due to the piracy association? Are end-user upload speeds too slow to meaningfully make a difference? Are swarms of ~100k just too large to manage?

Edit: Silly me for posting while sleep deprived. It's not the update itself that you're saying is causing thundering herd issues, but the log-ins all being synced up afterwards much like in TFA, duh. My curiosity wrt the apparent lack of P2P game updaters still stands though.

[donavanm]

See my related comment. It was a popular idea around 2005-10. As mentioned Red Swoosh was primarily sold as a “p2p” CDN, was bought up by akamai for a billionty dollars, and promptly disappeared. AWS S3 also implemented a torrent interface early on. AFAIK they keep it alive in name at least, but its effectively deadcode with $0 revenue as far back as Ive ever known. A handful of private companies built p2p themselves, but eventually moved off. As an example p2p is where spotify started in this time range and then moved to a CDN (us) for better consistency and not having to deal with it themselves.

The primary business problem is one of visibility and control. The customer UX would be entirely out if your control, and exceedingly variable, based on factors you (the provider) cant even see. At the same time CDNs were pushing down to cents per GB delivered by 2010, and ~1¢/GB by 2015. At a penny per GB distribution for higher throughout, better visibility, and control CDN distribution costs started to not matter compared to other costs and priorities.

Oh! Porn delivery companies, theyre an interesting content distribution case. AFAIK commercial CDNs are still way too expensive to meet their business model needs. My recollection is that they all built their own in house CDNs, like GPs “run a bunch of VMs” approach, or used a peers. This was accelerated as all of those companies consolidated ala MindGeek in the 2010s.

[dikei]

One reason for Spotify's move away from p2p was it was absolutely a no-go on mobile platform, which was rapidly becoming dominant at the time.

[pl4nty]

Microsoft Store and Xbox games/updates are distributed with a proprietary P2P protocol, which also includes ISP appliances. afaik it's the largest P2P network in the world. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/do/mcc-...

Steam recently introduced LAN-based P2P to complement their significant appliance/CDN infrastructure, but idk if anyone has pulled it apart yet. and I don't think it does tunnelling like the msft network

[masklinn]

Blizzard used to have p2p support, they removed it around 2015. It’s not hard to think of a bunch of problematic cases which become absolute hell to diagnose because they’re client side.

[AndrewDavis]

Their downloaders for classic games still have the options to enable peer to peer. Though it failed to initialise, but I'm not sure if that's because their tracker is down or because it demands upnp. I recently did this with Diablo 2 and it's expansion.

[UltraSane]

Windows Update has the option to download signed updates from Microsoft and any other computer that has downloaded it. And it says that 38% (247MB) of all windows update bytes have been downloaded form "PCs on the internet" and I have uploaded 340MB to "PCs on the Internet"

[tupshin]

around 2010, we (Zynga at the time) used torrent to distribute the MafiaWars code/assets to all servers in a couple of data centers. Worked without much challenge.