Steam & Blizzard (probably others) used to delivery games through torrent protocol in the past, before CDNs became cheaper.

When StarCraft 2 was lauched, the installer (before Battle.net installer crapware) had a complete graphical visualization of seeders & leechers.

Reference: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

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bayindirh 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, story time:

Once I was using Blizzard's downloader to install something (StarCraft, Diablo, I don't remember), and it was kinda slow. I disabled P2P downloads and speed skyrocketed, and I said "Huh, this was unexpected".

When P2P downloads disabled you could see the list of CDNs you're downloading from and mine had a single IP on that list. It looked familiar. Then it dawned on to me. It was the Akamai server which we were hosting in our system room, at 15 minutes of driving distance. After a chuckle, I went to get a cup of tea, because that was entertaining than the game itself.

Then of course, I dived into whatever I was installing that night.

Edit: From the screenshots in the wiki, I remembered that the progress bar was red. It was possibly Diablo 3, then. However, I'm still not 100% sure about it.

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alexpotato 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've worked at trading firms where the "reference data master" file is usually a big json or equivalent.

To get the file out to 100s or 1000s of machine they would often use private bittorent to distribute the file out.

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ehe78qhe 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've seen this used for distributing container images in networks with awkward network topologies (e.g. a lot of bandwidth within a site or sub-site but limited bandwidth to central registries)

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mococa 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same here. Inspired by both, I used to delivery videos over torrent to in door machines since at that time, there's no CDNs (or it was difficult to get one).

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mitxela 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As a private network, they have the option of multicast.

	▲	alexpotato 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When I retire and/or get "F You" money, I'm going to publicly tell a story about multicast, bittorrent and "not invented here" syndrome.

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ehe78qhe 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Steam has a limited form of p2p delivery, used on LANs: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE...

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Aurornis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Several companies tried this for distributing software.

It was very controversial. Users were angry that software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software. Made a lot of people angry.

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blharr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software

If I understand the description correctly, microsoft still does this!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-...

	▲	himata4113 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Steam still does this! For your local network only and not using the torrent protocol.

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ivanmontillam 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If only Blizzard servers were seeders, and clients were only leechers, that'd have not been a problem.

	▲	ehe78qhe 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is less efficient (in bandwidth, complexity, and monetary cost) than an HTTPS based CDN.
	▲	mococa 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There’s web seeding

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kzrdude 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Typical example to show that people who want to be angry will be angry, even for pointless things.

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mh- 5 hours ago | parent [-]

As someone who was annoyed by it at the time, I don't think it's a good example of that.

This was in an era of much more limited upstream bandwidth. The p2p nature was obscured from non-technical users in some implementations. So on and so on. I'm sure there are plenty of writeups from that era detailing why it was a bad idea.

These companies already used capable CDNs to distribute patches. It was a way for them to shift their CDN bill onto their paying customers.

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mitxela 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it's like residential proxies. People get upset about "it's using my thing!" even though it has literally no effect on them.

	▲	bayindirh an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		When you have barely the upstream bandwidth to send the ACK stream of your downloads, anything sending something becomes a big burden on your system. Not everyone has the luxury of fully symmetric internet connections even in this age. Yes, my uplink speeds are absurd when compared to a decade ago, but when I ratio it to my downlink, it's still slow. I have no comment on residential proxies. Somebody doing something in my name is unacceptable to put it very mildly.
	▲	mh- 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't know how to respond to that, because it has quite a few negative effects on them..