Valve has seemingly been working on some very exciting updates for Steam. One of the developer’s patents was recently discovered, and it could, among other things, allow users to play games as they download – similar to what they can do today on consoles (in some cases).
The patent, filed for in March last year, was published today. SteamDB’s Pavel Djundik picked it up, distilling its most interesting concepts on Twitter.
In short, this is a system that allows Steam to track read operations performed by the exe file of a given game, in order to draw a map of what and how often data is being accessed. Valve would then use this telemetry to, for instance, prioritise certain files during the download process to allow players to get started early without having to wait for the whole thing to finish.
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