Here’s how Steam is managing Bandwidth during the coronavirus pandemic

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Internet bandwidth has had a bit of focus recently due to everyone staying at home and soaking up all that juicy data. Since everyone’s quarantined/self-isolating, the amount of users online has soured. Just one look at Steam’s record concurrent player count recently should give you all the information you need as to how many people are actually going online more frequently now.

With the extra set of people using that glorious bandwidth gold, Steam has now introduced some new features as to how it will manage bandwidth during the coronavirus pandemic that currently has everyone stuck at home trying to work, learn or play.

If you’ve got a large library of games, with many that you keep downloaded just in case you want to play them at some point but it’s been 2 years since you last played them, then you probably would have experienced mass auto-updates. Steam has a feature that automatically updates games whenever they become available for games that you have downloaded. Sometimes this would work, and sometimes they would almost always be “scheduled for tomorrow” indefinitely.

Either way, Steam is changing these auto-updates to only occur on games that you’ve played within the last 3 days, helping ease the stress on your bandwidth. You can of course still manually update if you want to, this only affects the auto-update feature in Steam. And the download manager will still work and queue updates if you manually choose so.

There are a lot more features you can use if you’re still struggling with low bandwidth due to Steam, like setting bandwidth limits, disabling auto-updates entirely, scheduling auto-updates for later times or moving game files to different hard drives instead of uninstalling and re-downloading. To view all these features you can visit the Steam Support page here.

So what do you guys think? How will this affect you? Should this feature be implemented permanently? Let us know your thoughts!