Games

That's nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.

Camera isn't stuck in isometric view. You can zoom, pan, tilt and see all the fantastic detail.

I wouldn't say it's overhead. When you zoom a bit it's more like a third party view, except you can move the camera around.

A lot of older games were bigger because of static assets. Riven (myst 2) was fucking huge because it was like 60,000 jpgs. It was on 5 discs. Later games running in a 3D engine just had texture files and small models, they were a lot smaller.

There’s that quake 2 clone that team did a while back that was only 92KB- it generated everything in memory on the fly. Krieger I think it was called?

You can use the scroll wheel to zoom in pretty darn close! Closer than you probably ever need to.

it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.

While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D

Blizzard's Downloader used torrents.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/

Thank you and please not. I value my upload for myself. At best make it an opt-in!

They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.

As in DVDs or Blu Rays?

Computers running for hours just downloading, servers running hot to share the files, extra bandwidth in use - certainly not free.

But in contrast to producing optical media, burning data onto it, printing a cover, sticking it in a plastic box, sticking that plastic box in a larger box with polystyrene peanuts, putting that box with other boxes on a pallet, wrapping them in shrink wrap, flying them across the world, discarding the wrap, breaking down the pallet, driving individual boxes around a region, having an employee come to the store early by car to unload boxes, and have them put individual game cases on display on metal shelves and then lighting and air-conditioning said game cases for a few weeks until they're all sold to customers who drive to and from the store, and then run it on their local computer... Download has got to be more efficient. Certainly when most games then have an update to the disc version already required to download by the time the customer gets home.

I don't think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that's the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.

The main argument in favor of downloading is, it's easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other "clean" sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.

I have no info on it. I can speculate, and I'm happy to be corrected!

There is no way that physical media is greener.
Just the sheer production of physical media would be more than the servers, never mind the transportation, space in shops, people traveling to pick it up.
And then, day 1 rolls around and there would still be updates.
10x bandwidth for an hour is nothing.

And I'd consider everything up to the trunk routes of the internet. Ultimate, internet trunks and consumers are going to have internet. A data center peering to the trunks isn't hugely power intensive, the networks are going to exist and the bandwidth is available, it's mostly a matter of cost. So, it's essentially steams datacenter impact.

Could probably estimate it.

If it's able to deliver 150tbps, and we assume steam is using 100gbps networking per server (ultimately, it's just file serving), that's 1500 servers.
Say a server is 1.5kw, that's 1.5kw of power and 1.5kw of heat. DC cooling is about 15%, so 1.77kw per server.
Or 2.7 MW for all 1500 servers.
Round that up to 3MW to account for backups, spares, switches etc.
So, let's assume that the BG3 download took 3MW for 1 hour.
And, I feel, this is an over estimate.

Trucks are 300-500kw. Let's take 300kw, best case.
A single DVD case (let's ignore that this game is on the edge of a 4-layer bluray, and say it's single disc) is 55 grams.
2.5m copies (the lowest sales estimate I've seen) would be 137,500 kilograms, or 137t.
A 44t artic truck can carry 24t of cargo (this depends on the actual truck and local regulations, of course).
So, moving 137t of discs requires 6 trucks.
6 X 300kw = 1.8 MW.
So, if it take more than 2 hours to truck these discs to get them to stores, then transportation is already over the DC power requirements.

Normally pre-loading helps to even the load. For automatic updates, Steam strategically distributes them to even the load.

XCOM meets Diablo is a decent enough way of putting it, as long as you don't expect the mechanics to be 1:1. Since you brought up positioning, there's no grid for movement, or flanking, for example. Battles are turn-based, like XCOM, but it's not split in player turn and AI turn, instead, each individual character/npc gets its own turn, with the order decided based on dice rolls and whatever modifiers are applicable.