A minor tweak to Steam will soon let you change the way you download that monstrous 250GB update

Why update today what you can update in three months?

If your PC has ever started randomly roaring, and you check Steam only to find Space Marine 2 is panic-installing a 9 billion gigabyte update, then perhaps Valve's new upcoming feature is for you. For most of us, Steam simply slurps down fresh gigs of installed games automatically when a new update is released (and sometimes schedules the updates according to its own capricious whims). But the platform is testing a new option in the beta client, which lets you set download behaviour to git new gigs only when you actually launch a game. This would be a terrible curse, for reasons I will explain, but it's only going to be an option - not the new default.

Here's Valve's reasoning. First they explain how things currently work:

"For games you recently played, Steam will download game updates shortly after they are released," they say in a news post. "For games that you haven't played in a while, Steam might wait a few days to bundle multiple updates together or choose to download the update while you are asleep."

But then they explain the problem with this:

"While this default behavior works in most cases, there are times when you need more control of when updates are applied. Some users might want to delay updating a 200GB game until they are ready to play it again in a few months, especially if they are on metered connections or have monthly bandwidth caps."

Ah, yes, I can see that being a problem. So, to allow each user more control, they've added a dropdown menu in the download settings that lets you change the global default so that all your games will wait until you launch them before updating. This is what that menu looks like.

Image credit: Valve

You can already do something similar on a per-game basis, it's worth reminding you. But if you wanted it for every game, it meant going into each game's properties and individually changing it - kind of a chore. This will let you apply it to all your installed games.

Again, this is only a beta client thing so far (you can opt in like so). For me, downloading updates on launch would be a horrible existence. One of the major frustrations with console gaming is turning on the PS4 or PS5 to play a game, only to sit through multiple rounds of system updates and game updates because you haven't launched Gib Gonkers 2, or whatever, in months. By the time the updates are done, it's bedtime. There is no way in hell I want to turn Steam into that. But, yes, I can see it being useful for some concerned with bandwidth. Here's predicting the feature will quietly and confidently make its way to the stable branch soon.