2020’s unexpected remaster of the original Command & Conquer saw more than 42,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch. Oh also Path of Exile at one point changed that, now they unpacked that obese file, so updates take almost no time, instead of waiting 30GB files to be rewritten, because of a hotfix. Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition regularly cracks 20,000 simultaneous players on Steam, putting it in league with legendary RPGs like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Preallocation is just marking drive space where new files will be written aka used space, kinda the same and reverse at the same time as deleting files that marks space to be writeable aka usable, while wiping the start and part of a file will make the file unreadable and unrecoverable, for example downloading packaged files or video files, only the start and end of it is needed for it to work almost properly, even if part of the files in the middle are missing, that allows you to take a peek at what you're getting is what you're actually expecting to get. Because how many files are being overwritten and how big they are, mostly the latter.For example Path of Exile before had a 15GB file at start and then it grew to 30GB, didn't matter if the update was few GB or 1MB, the updating took as long, besides the downloading, as it will preallocated everything into steam download folder that needs updating, then it will download and read the original file and the update file and write to new stuff to the preallocated space.
