Any plans on working to support the Epic Games launcher or the EA launcher or is this something only possible due to the way Valve made Steam?
This has been possible due to the reverse engineering efforts on Steam (same with the
SteamDB site). We would love to get all the stores on it though. Imagine xbox game pass
on Via... instantly play any of the games since they are all 'free'. Need support from
them to make it happen though.
Do you think that a non-compatibility list could be useful to integrate into the program?
Game compatibility is surprisingly good at this point. It is expected that a game we've
never tried just works out of the box. The main problem now is just the performance
variance game to game. Most games work well on low ping, fewer work on high ping, and
rarely a game will just be too slow to work at all.
Does using Via for arbitrary games require development time?
We conform to the same semantics as NTFS (the standard Windows file system). This
means that games just work out of the box without added dev time from us or them.
So Via creates a fake drive that is added to steam as a library folder?
Yup, you can see the 'fake' drive in Windows explorer. We then just point Steam at
it and they think it is very real. This drive is backed by a brand new from scratch
file system driver we developed. Think Google Drive but on steroids for AAA game content.
How does Via interact with games that I already have installed on my drive the traditional way?
Any games you have previously installed through Steam will behave as normal. Steam will
pick the one from your real drive, and if it isn't installed there, it'll use the one
on Via.
What types of storage media should and shouldn't we try assigning space to Via to use? I'm imagining this might require pretty fast storage?
When it comes to your local storage, our only recomendation is to use an SSD.
Even gigabit speeds won't saturate a drive's write speed, so there are no restrictions.
Once content is cached, the faster the drive the faster the load, just like a normal
file system.
How big is a reasonable cache for the so called "huge game downloads" (~100gb+)
It depends a lot on the game. Huge games you probably need something like 10 gigs of
space to avoid redownloading content the next time you play. It really just comes down
to how much space you have though, if you only have 10 gigs, then you only have 10 gigs.
You may have to download some data twice sometimes, but on Steam you wouldn't have been
able to install the game at all!
Storage space is very cheap as of the moment...
The Steam deck has two versions: 512GB for $549 and 1TB for $649. $100 extra for what?
Almost all of that content would just be sitting there unused 99% of the time. Imagine
that instead they offer a 64GB model for $449. Use Via and buy games with the $200 you
save.
What are your monetization tactics?
For now it is free, but at scale we'd probably charge a monthly fee of ~<$5. Ideally that
wouldn't be required though, and Valve would decide to pay for the bandwidth since it'd
be way cheaper than their current system, and our incentives are aligned.
Do you pull the game data directly from steam or is there some via server in between?
Yes we have servers that are tightly integrated with the way Steam distributes content.
Initially we tried to be just a client and use the Steam servers directly, but they are
way too slow. It is not uncommon to get 5-10 second delays on requests. Not necessarily
a problem for them since they have no individual request latency requirements, but we do.
Does that mean you are hosting game content for free? Isn't that a copyright problem?
All content distributed from our servers remains encrypted with a key that the client has
to get separately from Steam servers. This is not unlike the existing Steam distribution
system. We are basically just a CDN in front of their backend.
Not using the steam website for the login looks a bit sus to me.
It isn't ideal, but it is required for the system to work. If you wanted, you could verify
all network traffic is done with a Valve owned domain when logging in. Ideally we wouldn't
need it though.
Any plans to support Linux/Mac?
The Steam Deck would be the motivator for Linux support. It would probably be easier to
build the Linux driver when compared to the Windows driver. This is not in the works yet
though.
Are there issues with anti-cheat or DRM?
Since we are a complete file system driver, the game doesn't know that we even exist. This
means all anti-cheats and DRM work fine.
Does Via support other launchers apart from Steam?
Yes we support games on Steam that have their own separate launchers. If it is on Steam,
it works on Via.
Will Via make loading times for games that are infamous for long loading times (like GTA V) even longer?
Yes Via will add to the load time (when not cached), but that is expected. We aren't trying
to beat the load time off disk, we are trying to beat download+load time. If you don't
pretend like you didn't spend an hour downloading the game before you could play it, Via
beats traditional downloads on Steam by up to 30x (depending on the game). And after you
download the content the first time, it comes off cache at local speeds the next time.
How much resources does Via take in the background? (CPU, RAM)
We've put a lot of effort into keeping the overhead very low. Via is actually a lot lower
overhead than the standard Windows file system (NTFS). We are also not scared to show it,
on the perf screen the 'cpu' and 'memory' display are for our kernel driver. This is not
common on Windows, but we record and show this info.