Valve’s digital storefront Steam might be getting a new “instant play” feature that lets you play games before they finished being downloaded, a patent suggests (via SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik‘s Twitter account). Steam’s file streaming patent was originally filed in March 2020 by developer Pierre-Loup Griffais, but it was made public today on September 21, 2021.
The Steam instant play feature update isn’t just designed to help people get into games faster, but it also appears to have the potential to help free up disk space and reduce loading latency. And best of all, unlike on EA’s Origin, Activision’s Battle.net, or PS4 that needs developers to specifically designed their games to utilize the feature, the patent submission claims that developers doesn’t need to do “any work to allow for the instant play feature” to be implemented and is a “value add for all games” on the platform.
Thanks to tons of telemetry data that Steam has gathered, the file streaming process will work by predicting what files you would need first to run the game then it will download additional data while the game is running. So whether you’re playing games made by small indie developers or AAA heavy-hitters on Steam, you should be able to play a portion of any game you have before the download bar hits 100%.
Here’s what the patent’s abstract reads:
The patent filer Griffais himself has spent a lot of time working on Valve’s Linux division; both on the Proton compatibility layer that lets Linux users play compatible Windows games and the Steam Deck handheld. Considering his involvement, it could mean that Steam instant play is developed with Steam Deck in mind since the portable PC has limited drive spaces. Only offering three, relatively small choices:
- 64GB of eMMC storage for the $399 model.
- 256GB NVMe SSD for the $529 model.
- 512GB of high-speed NVME SSD storage if you’re willing to shell out $649.
