Something I've been wondering for a while is if BitTorrent or other P2P protocols are ever a consideration for pushing game updates? Naively, it seems like an ideal fit since a large swarm of leechers quickly turns into a large swarm of (partial) seeders mostly chattering amongst themselves. I recall Facebook and Twitter used to internally torrent their updates in the 2010s and BT scales just fine to thousands of peers and tens of GB files at least, but I think I've only ever played one game whose updater was a torrent client so I'm guessing it's a nonstarter for one reason or another. Are game publishers just allergic to it due to the piracy association? Are end-user upload speeds too slow to meaningfully make a difference? Are swarms of ~100k just too large to manage?
Edit: Silly me for posting while sleep deprived. It's not the update itself that you're saying is causing thundering herd issues, but the log-ins all being synced up afterwards much like in TFA, duh. My curiosity wrt the apparent lack of P2P game updaters still stands though.
Edit: Silly me for posting while sleep deprived. It's not the update itself that you're saying is causing thundering herd issues, but the log-ins all being synced up afterwards much like in TFA, duh. My curiosity wrt the apparent lack of P2P game updaters still stands though.