That feeling of buying a digital game and having to wait a few hours for it to download is always bittersweet and tests our patience. If you have a very fast Internet connection, the drama is less, but not everyone is that lucky. Valve think about those players and could let us play to Steam games before about what are fully discharged.
A new patent, discovered by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, suggests that Steam is working on a system that lets play to the videogames before that the downloads have finished. This has happened on consoles for quite some time, but usually we only have access to a very limited version of the game, and therein lies the difference.
It is different what Steam intends because what emerges from the patent is that this system would allow us to play video games “without limits”, as it puts verbatim. That is, we could start enjoying a title full just by downloading a part of it. Could we also see it in the future on Steam Deck when it launches? It is also important to mention that this feature would not need any extra effort from the developers.
The system would be able to “track the reading operations performed by the video game executable during a game session”. This would make the client analyze the data to implement functions game-related such as “‘instant play’, discarding unused game data blocks to free up local memory resources, or local preloading of game data to reduce latency during game play.”
With patents you always have to be cautious, because it is common for companies to register functionalities, but does not mean that they will get to use them one day. We will see in the future if this is implemented, but it does seem like a breakthrough in this field; It could be very useful for those players with a slower Internet connection or if we download a very heavy title.