I plan to create a multi-level game and eventually sell it. A year ago I created a 10-level game the standalone of which took up around 2.5GB. With my broadband this would have taken about two days to download (I have heard the UK has the slowest broadband in western Europe).

Anyway, I'm just wondering if anyone has experience of downloading/uploading large applications via Steam. Is it feasible for a 2.5GB game to be successful on Steam or are there simply too few users whose broadband is fast enough for the download time to be acceptable?

I would really appreciate your advice.

2.5 gig is quite small these days especially for a steam game ...
I'm in the UK and " fathers Island " ( another GG game on steam ) is 2.5 gig and that only took me 5 mins to install
Game Guru itself with DLC, s is touching 10 gig

Other example of smaller games on steam I own ...

Half-life II = 6 gig
Take on Mars - 5 gig
Luner Flight = 5 gig
Trainz Simulator 2012 = 10 gig
TS 2016 = 10 gig
Flashback = 3 gig

Then we get the big boys

Star Citizen 40 gig
Star Wars Battlefront = 40 gig
ArK Survival Evolved = 50 gig

Like I said 2.5 gig is nothing ..... Most product I buy on steam I expect up to 10 gig or more installations ..
If you go to your steam library and click install on a game that's not already .... it will tell you the size ... then try one and see how long it takes
2.5 Gig is minutes for me really ... I have virgin broadband .... But usually even BT or sky wouldn't take much more than 15 mins for that ?

Oh really? :p

Thanks. That gives me great confidence to go ahead and create my big blockbuster. Maybe it's just my broadband that is slow then. I've got Talk Talk.

What exactly is your location .... 2 days for 2.5 gig is almost old dial up speeds ?

Mine is terrible too but I live in the middle of nowhere so its expected...
250kb/s is my download speed, literally 1000x slower than belidos broadband :p
And yh for the size of the land, UK internet is slow but if you live in a fibre enabled area its fine.
I think size will only really matter once you start getting into double figures, hard drives are very large and cheap and with stores like steam its very easy to simply uninstall games once you're done and because its still in the library you can redownload it anytime.

LOL, I work for one of the local communications providers, formerly the Bell System. I work on DSL and all it's relatives (ADSL, VDSL, ADSL2, VDSL2, and all the plusses) as well as GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network). The GPON is actually capable of much much more than 1Gb/s. It's actually capable of 24 or 26 in both directions, I don't remember which , doesn't matter, we cap it, for now, at 1 Gb in both directions. My house is less than 300' from one of our fiber splitters (new development behind the neighbor's house, I'm in a cul de sac) and there is a DSLAM about the same distance away behind my back wall, which is a small park; It would be possible to get fantastic speeds from either of these if my house was fed from either. The funny thing (the LOL part) is that the DSLAM that I am fed from is actually over a mile away, and the best I can do is 12Mb/s or 20Mb/s bonded. I currently have the 12 meg. I could get faster service from the cable company, of course, but that would be treasonous without the employee discount, lol.

EDIT: I have found, though, that 12M is fine for me. I can stream HD to any TV in the house (I have no cable or satellite service, just Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, and SlingTV and an antenna that gives me 55 channels HD), and downloading a large game, 10G or so, takes some time, but I just do it while I'm away or asleep.

I live in Hampshire. I don't know much about the technicalities of this but maybe my router or my PC or the server I was uploading to might have contributed to the slow performance...? I don't know.

I just ran a speed test via broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk

Results:
Ping: 122 ms
Download: 6.37 Mb/s
Upload: 1.42 Mb/s

Seems rather pathetic!

And on Ookla:

Mine's not as bad as smallg's speed, but at 1mbps it took me about two weeks to download GTA V, and with most major releases bigger than 20gb, it's quite painful. I pity people who don't have an uncapped connection - even if you buy the disk, you normally have updates of 5gb+ to get a game running.

Problem is asymetrical conns, downloand and upload mbps, should be the same, here we have this problem too.
Nevermay if you've a lot download mbps, since your download speed depending of the sender upload speed.

I'm living in the middle of the forest, non fibre area here, and other providers just offering asymetrical connections.

3com

How are your mobile phone internet connections at home ... Do you get better speeds from those ?
Just curious ...

i do, my mobile speed right now is 17.5mb/s (varies a little depending on the time of day but i've never seen it as low as the phone line broadband) - signal strength is actually really good when you're stationary too but they don't offer uncapped limits so it would be super expensive to use it instead broadband. i had to use it for a month once while waiting for them to set up the phone line when we moved here and i spent far too much

even at my slow speed my broadband is fine for a single user, i can stream tv services like netflix or BBC iplayer etc and youtube works fine at 480p (720p+ would need to preload) and online games are generally ok, you just learn to die a lot in pvp
but if 2 people are trying to use it at the same time... then it really sucks.

Online games aren't usually effected by download/upload speed, it's the ping (how fast the server hops between you and the target server pass on the data)that effects them, you can have the fastest connection in the world, but your ping could be extremely high and you would lag in online games, and likewise you could have the slowest of connections and have super low ping and no lag.

Here in unincorporated Wales, I get: PING=324 ms DL=42.08 Mb/s UL=4.89 Mb/s (would not mind that 300MB download though)