So, some of you may be aware that from time to time Steam runs Free Weekends for some of it’s catalogue where you can tell it to download the game, and over a period of a few days play it.

This latest one of course has proven to me that it’s really a waste of my bandwidth.

First up, the weekends normally start on the thursday or friday or something (depends where you are, for me it’s friday) and you then get the ability to install the game.

From there it download the game, which these days can be quite significant, this one for example is around 10Gig in size.
Your connection quality plays in to this, and we’re not all fortunate enough to have 1Gb connections.
So it can often take quite awhile, especially if you’ve utilised Steam’s rate limiting function (in my case to 60KB/s).

After all this you get to play it.

For me it’s now sunday, I’ve finished acquiring the game, and I am now able to play it.

There’s a patch, more downloading.

It’s done, I can now click the play button and play, giving me maybe a day or two at most with which I can play.

The reason I consider it to be a waste of bandwidth in my case is I already own a game account.
It was already installed, it was already up to date.

The way it was originally released with steam was the service provided the launcher only, from there the launcher would download the rest of the content (all 10gig of it.)

I have now successfully re-downloaded the entire game when I didn’t need to in the first place.

Well done Steam.

And now I’m going to go and play something else instead after all this.

AmK out.