The coronavirus outbreak has understandably put considerable pressure on the online services we use to keep us entertained while cooped up at home; Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon have all made changes to their services to keep data flowing smoothly and Valve plans to adjust Steam's auto-update feature starting this week to better manage bandwidth usage.

Steam already schedules updates for recently unplayed games during local off-peak hours, but these updates will now take place over several more days.

"Only games that have been played within the past 3 days will be updated immediately. You can also initiate (or pause indefinitely) updates at any time from the Download Manager. We are also looking into additional solutions for support on Valve's end."

The update also mentions user-controllable options to help reduce data usage:

This seems to be a relatively minor change, more like the default for standard-definition videos on YouTube than the across-the-board bandwidth reduction imposed by Netflix in the EU similar to that of YouTube's standard-definition videos. Nevertheless, the change may have an impact anyway, given that Steam's player count is skyrocketing: Steam's concurrent player count, which has hovered just under 19 million for the past few years, surpassed 20 million in mid-March and 22 million a week later. It is hard to say where the ceiling is at this point, so it is not surprising that Valve is doing what it can to alleviate that pressure.