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The most wonderful time of the year – Steam’s Summer Sale 2014

The most wonderful time of the year – Steam’s Summer Sale 2014

The most wonderful time of the year – Steam’s Summer Sale 2014

Steam Summer Sale 2014 Steam’s summer sale kicked off yesterday, with huge reductions on the price of many top games, and some hidden gems you might not have heard of. The sale is due to run through to the 30th June and has already included some top gaming titles in the opening rounds of discounts. Here at Plusnet we’ve got some avid gamers who love to buy and talk about all things gaming, so when the sale started we were pretty excited to see what was coming up. As well as the daily deals, there are regular shorter flash sales. Steam gamers can even vote for which games they want to go on sale next!

So why are my ISP talking about the Steam Sale?

Aside from my personal interest in gaming, which probably means this sale will empty my wallet again, we’ve already seen an increase in Steam traffic across our network. The resident Plusnet traffic management guru, Dave, pulled out this graph for us: Steam traffic on Plusnet network You can see the impact easily on the above graph, with yesterday’s Steam traffic dwarfing any other day this week. Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of bandwidth to cope with this increase, just make sure that you’ve got enough hard-drive space for all those new games. And don’t forget that our new products are totally unlimited, so you don’t need to worry about hitting your usage allowance. My personal recommendation is Monaco, currently available for a massive 90% off at just £1.19. It’s a heist game for single player or co-op with your friends.   Do you get tempted to buy in the Steam sales? Have you got a list of unplayed games too? Let us know

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10 Comments
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10 Comments
Kelly
Hero
I just bought a 4pack of Monaco... Smiley
Athanasius
Hooked
33% of my Steam purchases are still unplayed (according to http://steamdb.info/calculator/ ), but I think a little of that is expansions not being properly counted. Still, I have enough to be getting on with, so I'm trying to resist any temptation the SSS might have. No, really, I am!
Chris
Legend
@Athanasius I wish I hadn't looked at that site now! I've not played 45% of my games apparently.
davidhope
Hooked
For the networking geeks amongst us, could we get some more info? I have some specific (related) questions: - How does the peak shown above compare to other traffic peaks such as iOS release days? - Can we get some actual numbers? Intrigued to see how much traffic that is - How are you measuring the traffic? Are you using Netflow or something? And in terms of Monaco, cant wait to try it when I get in from work!
Gus
Aspiring Pro
Just be aware DLC packs for games on offer, they are usually a one time buy if you have already bought one. You can't buy another and use it on the same account, wanted the warframe dlc Tenno pack but I got it during the last 75% sale Also if getting Fallout 3, it has major problems with anything but win XP and older pc's. It requires ini editing to run on one or two cores at most and has to be run in win98 compatibility mode. Even after those fixes its still not happy with modern pc's and win Vista/7/8
dave
Plusnet Help Team
Hi Dave, The Steam traffic peaked at just over 6Gbps last night, iOS7 in comparison did about 30Gbps last year, there's some graphs from half our network here: http://community.plus.net/blog/2013/09/19/unprecedented-demand-for-ios7/ The traffic is measured on our traffic management platform (so that we put the games in the highest priority).
davidhope
Hooked
Thanks Dave - I should have search for that. Are there any details of what products/technologies you're using for your traffic management? Would love to read about it from a technical point of view (Think Cisco CCNP level detail) but I'm guessing I can only dream.
Kelly
Hero
Dave: Have a look at some of the products Procera supply.
Hertslad
Newbie
i guess i am in that graph somewhere lol i have got loads of games from steam in the sale i got football manager 14
ayster
Dabbler
Just looked at the Steam Database ... :O Profile creation 5 years ago (October 12, 2009 – 10:02:49 UTC) Last log off about 3 hours ago (June 24, 2014 – 07:57:45 UTC) Games owned 260 Games not played 106 (41%) Games not in store 12 Hours spent 742.3h Total cost £2202.67! 😮