alt Hacker NewsIn this case, the bug was 131 GB of wasted disk space after installation. Because the waste came from duplicate files, it should have had little impact on download size (unless there's a separate bug in the installer...)
This is why the cost of the bug was so easy for the studio to ignore. An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years, so they might have asked the game studio to look into it.
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> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years
Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.
It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P
This article presents it as a big success, but it could be read the opposite way: "Developers of Helldivers 2 wasted 130 GB for years and didn't care because it was others people computers"