Steam might soon allow players to start playing their newly purchased games before they are done downloading them.
According to a new patent published (via Pavel Djundik) earlier today, developer Valve has been looking into the idea of “instant play of video games” for Steam where players can start playing as soon as they have downloaded the first few blocks of game data. They will hence be able to continue playing uninterrupted while the downloading finishes in the background.
New Valve patent for tracking game file read operations and to allow "instant play" where you can start a game before it finishes downloading.https://t.co/VYGj7p9siG
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) September 21, 2021
Such a feature however is not new. Blizzard did it a long time back for its games on Battle.net as well as other developers out there. Games on PlayStation and Xbox also support the same feature. The difference here being that Valve wants to force the feature across the board for all Steam games and without developers having to do or change anything.
The same patented system will also be designed to “prefetch blocks of [unused] game data to reduce latency during gameplay” as well as to free up storage space on hard drives.
Elsewhere, players should ready their wallets. The dates for upcoming Steam Sales were leaked last month and the first one (Halloween Sale) will potentially take place next week from October 28 to November 1. The second one (Autumn Sale) will take place from November 24 to November 30 before moving on to the third and final one (Winter Sale) from December 22 to January 5, 2022.
