> Cool. Does your shitty PHP app tie into dozens of incredibly popular games, and hundreds more of moderately popular ones? Has it been tested for years, both by in-house QA and real-world friction?
And those are just the nasty development parts. Building a CDN like steam is hard and expensive. Many geo-distributed servers, peering arrangements up to hundreds of gbits with many different local ISPs, hardware management. Some globally replicated shop database, search systems. And then operational infrastructure on top of all of that just to able to control and maintain that mess of boxes. Even if at every point in time, something is borked in a network that large.
Politics aside. It's easy to assume steam being simple, because the steam application doesn't do much. But building a system like steam is actually a lot harder than it looks.
And those are just the nasty development parts. Building a CDN like steam is hard and expensive. Many geo-distributed servers, peering arrangements up to hundreds of gbits with many different local ISPs, hardware management. Some globally replicated shop database, search systems. And then operational infrastructure on top of all of that just to able to control and maintain that mess of boxes. Even if at every point in time, something is borked in a network that large.
Politics aside. It's easy to assume steam being simple, because the steam application doesn't do much. But building a system like steam is actually a lot harder than it looks.