The Steam summer sale has finally arrived, meaning hundreds of games are now available at low prices. However, after you purchase your digital cart full of games, you may notice a new, strange issue. Your usual download speed that gets games onto your drive of choice has suddenly plummeted down to single megabytes per second or even less.
If you’ve experienced just that recently, don’t worry. Your internet hasn’t suddenly gotten worse, nor has your service provider suddenly placed throttling limits ahead of the summer sale. Instead, it’s much more likely that you’re not the only one trying to download a game. The number of people downloading games is so high in your region that it’s actually slowing Steam itself down.
How to fix low Steam download speeds
The fastest way to work around this is to change the region you download games from to a part of the world where it’s late at night or early in the morning. To change this setting, open up Steam, click on “Steam” in the top left corner of the window, and then select “Settings.” From there, go to the “Downloads” sub-menu, and change your download region.
You’ll have to restart Steam afterward, but once it starts up again, you’ll be able to download your games from a non-congested server. Your speeds may not be as high as they usually are, but they’ll certainly be better than they were on your busy local server.
