Valve announced that Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025. For reference, that's 100 million terabytes, or about 274 petabytes per day on average. It's an impressive infrastructure achievement—but more importantly, it shows how game file sizes have spiraled completely out of control.
According to PC Gamer, Valve's content delivery network is handling petabytes of traffic daily just to keep gamers updated. As someone who's built scalable systems, I'm genuinely impressed. As a gamer who had to delete three games to install the latest Call of Duty update, I'm annoyed.
Let's talk infrastructure first, because what Valve has built is genuinely impressive. 100 exabytes isn't just big—it's operating-at-internet-scale big. That's more traffic than many countries generate in a year. Valve had to build their own CDN, optimize delivery protocols, and handle peak loads when popular games launch updates simultaneously. This is world-class engineering.
Now let's talk about why they had to build all that infrastructure: because game developers stopped optimizing. Call of Duty titles regularly exceed 250GB. Microsoft Flight Simulator can hit 170GB. Red Dead Redemption 2 is 150GB. These aren't compressed data sizes—these are what actually gets written to your drive.
The argument is always "storage is cheap" and "bandwidth is plentiful." Except storage isn't cheap at 100 exabytes, and bandwidth isn't plentiful when you're trying to download a 100GB day-one patch on launch day. The externality of lazy optimization is being absorbed by Valve's infrastructure and users' internet connections.
Here's what drives me crazy from an engineering perspective: these file sizes are mostly unnecessary. High-resolution textures that you'll never see because you're not playing at 4K. Multiple language audio tracks that you don't need. Uncompressed assets because compression takes development time and might introduce bugs. The priority is shipping fast, not shipping efficiently.
