While some platforms already allow you to play a game for download, a patent filed by Valve last year and published very recently suggests that such a feature would soon arrive on Steam.
A find on Free Patents Online that we owe to Pavel Djundik, owner of the SteamDB site, who is therefore very interested in developments in the Valve platform.
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Steam catching up?
After improving its page related to downloads, another appreciable feature concerning them could make its way to Valve sooner or later. Some platforms like Origin from Electronic Arts or Battle.net from Activision Blizzard already have such a system, allowing you to launch a limited version of the game while waiting for it to be fully downloaded.
A way to curb the patience of those with a fairly slow connection, although often the operation paradoxically slows down the downloading of the game itself. According to the patent application filed by Valve, such a feature would “use a proxy system file configured to track the playback operations performed by the executable during a game session”. This feature could also report the progress of the read data to a remote system.
Concretely, this would mean that Steam would be able to know the amount of data downloaded and how much the user's machine still needs to download to play. It would therefore be possible for Steam to allow the user to access the game elements already downloaded before it is fully installed. A serious evolution compared to competing platforms which are often content to leave the user access to the game menus while waiting.
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A less intrusive functionality on paper
The patent also describes the feature as less intrusive in terms of latency or performance when a game being downloaded is launched. Such a tour de force would go through “the recovery and deletion of unnecessary client-side data”. In theory, this would mean that downloading a Steam game does not compromise data integrity.
A method that should therefore have less impact on the hard disk or SSD reading process and therefore significantly less affect performance than such features already existing on other platforms. All this a priori without also risking slowing down the download of the game.
Of course, this is just a simple patent application. Nothing indicates that Valve really intends to exploit it anytime soon, or even exploit it at all. But knowing the company of Gabe Newell and his almost scientific approach to things, it may well be that this project will come to fruition one day or another. How effective this feature will be on Steam, only time will tell.
