Valve has patented a new “instant play” feature for Steam that would allow impatient users to play games before they’re finished downloading. The idea isn’t exactly revolutionary, as similar systems have already been implemented in other platforms and clients such as Xbox, PlayStation, Origin, and Battle.net, but it should be a welcome addition in light of the ridiculously large file sizes that more and more PC games weigh in at these days.
It isn’t clear when (or even if) Valve will enable this feature in Steam, but the patent abstract sheds a little light into how it’ll work. The feature seems to leverage telemetry to enable “instant play” of video games.
Client machines running game executables of a video game(s) may utilize a file system proxy component that is configured to track read operations made by the game executable during a game session, to generate access data based on the tracked read operations, and to report the access data to a remote system. This telemetry approach allows the remote system to collect access data reported by multiple client machines, to catalogue the access data according to client system configuration, and to analyze the access data to generate data that is usable by client machines to implement various game-related features including, without limitation, “instant play” of video games, discarding of unused blocks of game data to free up local memory resources, and/or local prefetching of game data for reducing latency during gameplay.
What’s really neat is that game developers may not have to do any additional work to enable instant play for games distributed on Steam. “[…] the technique of the process 800 is game agnostic, meaning that a game developer doesn’t need to do any work to allow for the instant play 128 feature; rather, it is a value add for all games on a video game distribution platform that distributes video games to a heterogenous population of client system configurations.”
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
Source: FPO (via Pavel Djundik)