For a while now, various digital platforms have allowed impatient gamers to start playing their games before they’ve finished fully downloading. Certain features might be disabled until the download is done, but it allows for general gameplay without having to wait however long it would normally take based on the download size and your internet speed. This might save you a few minutes or a few hours.
Steam has yet to implement such a feature. To play a game, you have to wait for that game to be fully downloaded. However, a new Valve patent might be our first indication that might soon change.
We have SteamDB owner and operator Pavel Djundik to thank for pointing us towards Valve’s latest patent. Djundik’s site is a great source for Steam leaks, and Djundik himself likes to keep tabs on Valve and spread the good news whenever it arrives.
And this latest patent is certainly good news. United States Patent 11123634, filed in March and published just today, would allow PC gamers to "utilize a file system proxy component that is configured to track read operations made by the game executable during a game session." This new software feature would also track what parts of that data have already been read and report that progress to a remote system.
What this effectively means is that Steam would know how much data has been downloaded, what data the player needs to play their game, and also what data the player might need in the immediate future. This allows Steam to not only implement an "instant play" feature that allows the player to start a game before it's finished downloading, but also to download a game in pieces, streaming in parts of the game based on player progress. Additionally, parts of the game that the player no longer requires--like earlier levels they've already beaten--could be deleted to save system memory.
Best of all, the patent doesn’t require game developers to do anything differently with their games. Steam handles the data streaming components all on its own.
As always, just because a patent exists doesn’t mean it’ll be implemented, and even if it does it probably won’t be anytime soon. Expect Steam to still require a fully downloaded game before you can play for now, but maybe someday, that’ll change.