[gambiting]

I work from home, and in video games. I download multiple 80-100GB builds every single day just to do my job. Virgin's 1.2Gbps connection is barely good enough. The moment they bring 2 or 3Gbps out on their nextfibre service I'll upgrade to it almost no matter the cost. I'm jealous of our European neighbours where you can get domestic 10Gbps connections.

But beyond work - the ability to download any game from steam within 10-15 minutes max is amazing. I play online games with friends twice a week and sometimes we decide what to play that evening spontaneously - and being able to download a 100GB game and play it the same evening is a game changer(pardon the pun).

[matja]

Is that 80-100GB of unique data multiple times per day? Is it encrypted with a different key every time? Sounds very interesting.

[gambiting]

Yes. Our build system produces complete packages of the game, and I'm a platform engineer - so within one day I'll often download a PC package, one for PS5, Xbox, Switch, Android and iOS, depending on what kind of thing I'm working on. So yes all of them are completely unique. Or I'm looking at builds made for different backends. Or I pushed a preflight for overnight cooking/building, it takes about 8 hours - so I need to download the output to see if it works across different systems.

[aeonik]

Not OP, but modern asymmetric cryptography on the Internet negotiates a new encryption key on every connection.

[matja]

True, but that is transport (TLS). I was asking about the underlying data.

[aeonik]

I am curious why you are interested in that.

[matja]

Because I would have expected for game development that it would be rare for majority of the large assets (art, textures, 3d meshes, video, sound, music) to change multiple times per day, so - to me - sounds like would perfectly suit a differential/incremental sync protocol, rather than treating everything as a large packed blob. At least that was the case for the game development I did.

[gambiting]

And generally - you are correct. But builds made for specific platforms have all of their assets "cooked" for that platform - so textures shipping on PS5 are not in the same format as textures shipping on the Switch, even though they were both made from the same original reference file.