Steam recently shared it will no longer auto-update players’ games regularly, in an effort to preserve bandwidth.

Joining the efforts of both Sony and Microsoft, Steam is so far only limiting auto-updates, which honestly, isn’t that big of a deal. Steam will prioritise auto-updates to games you’ve played in the last 3 days.

That doesn’t mean the other games you play won’t be updated at all. Those games will just receive their updates several days later, not immediately.

According to Valve, Steam has been scheduling game updates for “the next off-peak local time period”. Though, if you still thought of playing a game from a month ago, you can always just initiate the update yourself. Maybe expect those manual game updates to be slower than usual, though.

Valve does allow its users to schedule their own auto-updates and even self-throttle their connection to Steam, though it’s unclear if that may change in the future.

For the time being, I don’t see the current measures taking hold on Steam to be incredibly drastic. Unlike Sony, they’ve already limited download speeds in both the EU and US for smoother online play. Microsoft themselves recently disabled custom gamer pic uploads to help its moderators.

Apart from gaming, streaming networks like YouTube have also taken measures by reducing streaming quality to ease network traffic.

Steam recently broke its record for the third week in a row, peaking over 23 million users online worldwide.