Prerelease Download of Civilization V?

[mantis2007]

I'm wondering if a representative from 2K will say whether the Civilization V game files will be available to download prior to the release dates of September 21 and 24.

In order to help relieve strain on download servers, for several recently released PC games, publishers have made the game files available for download several days (or even several weeks) in advance of the official release date. This allows download customers to avoid waiting around on release day have the game files on hand (locked and unusable until the release date).

I recall seeing this question posed previously in this forum some time ago, and one of the 2K representatives said that no answer one way or the other was available at that time. Perhaps now that the release date is only about three weeks away, there is an answer available.

I'd also note that Civilization V lead designer Jon Shafer posted a message on Twitter just last night (August 28), where he said: "Waiting patiently for Starcraft II to finish downloading. Silly me to assume that it would take less than 7 hours with FIOS."

Of course, it's not necessarily true that Civilization V will take more than seven hours to download simply because that's the time it took for Starcraft, but the point stands. I don't want to spend the better part of September 21 waiting for the download to finish before I can eagerly dig in to the game.

It is well understood that simply purchasing a physical copy of the game would allow customers to avoid waiting for the download, so please do not make this thread into a debate about download vs. physical media.

Thanks for any information you can provide at this time.

 

[Infiltrator]

Nothing official, but I know every major title was available for pre download on steam several days before release.

 

[12agnar0k]

It's likely that you will be able to pre-load the game files, Steam will get them before the 21st, (its not like a man in a frixasis van turns up at 7am on the 21s't to Valve headquarters with a DVD containing the data), they will most likely already have the gold version on their servers right now, like what is put on DVD's already if thjats been done yet, its just a matter of Steam waiting for the right time before they allow pre-loads which is pretty unique to the Steam app.

 

[Yosomono]

Yeah, I'd really like an official comment on pre-loading for sure.
When those poor Steam servers start getting hammered and my download speed drops to a trickle, I won't be a happy camper.

 

[Mercade]

Yeah, I'd really like an official comment on pre-loading for sure.
When those poor Steam servers start getting hammered and my download speed drops to a trickle, I won't be a happy camper.

Of course, everybody wants to have an official answer. This isn't the first time a popular game is released on Steam, though. Unless there's an official statement to the contrary, the Civ5 release is going to be just as every other release. Experience of previous releases says that there's probably going to be a few days of preloading, there's enough bandwidth, but not everybody is going to be able to download 7 gig in half an hour.

 

[lietkynes]

I bought few games on Steam recently, including some new releases, and I was able to get good download speeds (around 1,2 mb/s) on release day, so I wouldnt worry too much about it.

 

[Yosomono]

Of course, everybody wants to have an official answer. This isn't the first time a popular game is released on Steam, though. Unless there's an official statement to the contrary, the Civ5 release is going to be just as every other release. Experience of previous releases says that there's probably going to be a few days of preloading, there's enough bandwidth, but not everybody is going to be able to download 7 gig in half an hour.

I bought few games on Steam recently, including some new releases, and I was able to get good download speeds (around 1,2 mb/s) on release day, so I wouldnt worry too much about it.

Sure, I only worry because I'm off in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific region, so no guarantee anything will be speedy.

 

[Tarkhan]

Last preload I got on Steam was Mass Effect 2, downloaded early pretty fast.