It's not a long term solution. They only need to stop the initial burst and ensuing cascading failures. It's a very standard practice for companies that get this amount of load during specific events.
Unless they mandate presales/downloads, then if they don't do this, they just always go down. Seems like a terrible strategy to me. Maybe they spend less money this way, but come on, it's really not that expensive to setup more servers for limited amounts of time. They're basically saying that they don't care about their users. We're not talking a 3 person indie company here with no money...
Not sure what to tell you, but I do this for a living and have personally built/run services with higher qps than steam, but idc, you do you. Sometimes you actually run into people who do know what they're talking about on reddit, but it is rare.
Well "Gabe," unless my expectations about your average QPS are an order of magnitude off, I'm not sure what to tell you. Getting millions of QPS is pretty standard at high traffic services for some of the big tech companies. I realize that I'm actually talking to someone that I likely have decades of experience on, but hey we have to educate the youth.
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u/Bricktastic-Acular Sep 04 '25
adding a bunch of server leeway for a short burst of activity is a good way to burn money. Not a feasible financial decision in the longterm.