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When Baldur's Gate 3 came out, Steam's overall bandwidth consumption went from around 18 Tbps to 146 Tbps
(reddthat.com)
From Steam's self-published stats.
Baldur's Gate 3 could not be preloaded and weighed in at 125 gigabytes on disk, so when the game left Early Access at 11am US Eastern yesterday, Steam's bandwidth utilization shot up 8x over a span of 30 minutes. I know personally, I saw my download hit over 600 Mbps across a 1 Gbps fiber connection.
Kudos to the system engineers at Valve. It is mind-boggling that they have built infrastructure that robust.
At what point does it becomes cheaper to ship it to the buyer on a thumb drive?
Some backup services charge less for shipping a hard drive then bandwidth, last I looked it was around 8tb to be cheaper (for the user) then restoring over the internet. So I'd guess it's around that mark, but I'm obviously not an expert.