Valve Is Working On Games That Play While They Download
Valve, despite the gaps between the games it produces, keeps itself pretty busy. Granted, most of the team's time is taken up by Steam, but Valve busy nonetheless - especially with the Steam Deck coming over the horizon.
Considering Valve is the (almost) uncontested champs of PC gaming online stores, it’s for good reason - the Steam summer sale is a legendary event in the gaming community and the site’s UI is second to none.
And now, it looks like Valve is working on ways to make the gaming experience even smoother.
Valve Working On Games That Play During Download
Click to enlargeLast March, Valve filed for a patent that would allow it to work on new technology. In good news, it was just published in the last few days.
The patent is for a system that lets Steam track operations by the exe file of a game, in order to create a map of what and how often data is being accessed. This techy jargon means, that in short, game downloads can prioritise certain files over others and build the game in chronological order.
Basically, players can work through the first portion of a game without needing to worry about downloading the entire thing for it to work. But, uh… don’t go thinking this is particularly groundbreaking.
This Has Existed For Years On Console
We certainly don’t mean to be elitist here, but this has been around for many years now. Xbox has its "Ready To Start" feature for players to hop into small portions of the game before it's entirely downloaded, while PlayStation calculates how much of the game you need to download before jumping into it.
We hate to be party poopers, but the feature has been around for some time - not that it isn’t a great thing that PC players will soon be able to take advantage of it.
To be fair to Valve, it has made its own massive innovations in the gaming world to allow such a feature to stay unaddressed for so long. With the Steam Deck on the way too, who knows - maybe the feature will make it to the handheld too?