With more people staying home, Steam makes changes to reduce bandwidth use

Valve is making slight changes to Steam’s auto-updating feature to free up more bandwidth during the hours newly home-bound internet users need the 'net for work, education, and the like.

The most apparent change noted in today’s blog post makes it so only games played within the last 3 days will queue up for an automatic download. Any game update that qualifies for an auto-update under that rule will then still be scheduled for an off-peak download, but Steam is also now spreading those behind-the-scenes updates out across more days than it previously had.

The full post nods at other small ways and settings Steam users can use to cut back on the client’s daytime bandwidth usage, while Valve also notes that it is also looking into other ways it can help cut back on Steam’s internet usage from its end.