- Physical boxes are expensive to manufacture, and most users these days simply don't care about them (see popularity of Steam).

- Manufacturing and retail significantly constrain development timelines. Dates have to be set contractually and are prohibitively expensive to change (if possible at all). This means it is not possible for smaller companies to take a 'when it's done' stance and still make retail.

As to the speed, that is entirely dependent on Steam's CDN and your own bandwidth. We can't really draw any conclusion from your statement, though. 4GB/s consumer internet does not exist, so you are probably misstating that, and 32 hours for a 2GB download places it at less than an order of magnitude more than dial-up speeds, which few would consider broadband.

If you run a speed test and post your results we might be able to comment more. But given that even GC2 fully loaded is nearly 2GB, I certainly wouldn't expect GC3 to weigh in any less.

First of all, I have never heard of an internet speed given in bytes. It has always been in bits/sec. Second of all, even if your speed was 4 Gbps, that is tremendously fast. I have never heard of any speed above 40Mbps, but the speed has been growing faster than I can keep up with.

Third, it sounds like the actual performance you got was about 140Kbps, which is higher than any dialup speed I have ever heard about (28Kbps), and less than the slowest DSL speed I have ever heard of (256Kbps). Perhaps there is something else going wrong. Even if your net speed was 40Mbps, your 1.9G bytes should have downloaded in a bit over (lets see, 1.9G * 8 / 40Kbps = 380 seconds / 60 = ..) about 7 minutes, rounded up a bit to account for the transmission overhead always encountered with downloads. (Now that seems a bit fast. Are my calculations correct?) On a 6Kbps line, like I have, this would be a bit over 43 minutes.

Another thing to remember, with Steam in the picture, any download can be interrupted in the middle and then resumed. When GC1 first came out, they provided the same capability with their download, and it worked quite well.

Here in Germany, some ISPs provide speeds of up to 100Mbps, but it's not available everywhere. Some areas are still stuck at 2Mbps or less.

Darca,

Many people already are used to this, but your query suggests it is worth mentioning that the terminology used for transmission  speed is expressed as Bytes per second (Bps, KBps, or MBps -- used for non-internet stuff, like hard disk delivery rates) and bits per second (bps, Kbps, or Mbps -- used for internet, LAN, WiFi, and a few other things). The key is the use of an uppercase B for Bps (bytes) and a lowercase b for bps (bits). My apologies if you already knew this.

Now that you mention it, I have seen adds for T-mobile, Verison, and other mobiles that talk about 4G. I am not sure what the 4G means, but I have difficulty believing it is bit speed.

In addition, it is possible your mobile link is the fastest link in the chain. I don't know of any IEEE approved standard that provides WiFi speeds faster than 100Mbps. Other things can get in the way as well, such as the delivery speed of the server you are downloading from, server load, internet load, slowest connection link, etc.

Edit, corrected the figure I gave for WiFi.

4G means fourth generation, not 4GBps. Typically that means LTE or WiMax (neither of which are technically 4G) in the US, which have spec maximums of 100Mbps and 128Mbps respectively. In the real world, you'll be lucky to get a tenth of that in most cases, which would be similar to low-end cable.

If you tried downloading Mass Effect through a phone tether, I suspect that your actual speeds are far less than the 'lucky' case. That case was quite low even for 3G, and pretty close to 2G.

Edit: Yes, if you hit your limit early on and were throttled to 2G, taking 32 hours to download 2GB makes perfect sense. 2G is only a couple of times faster than dial-up on the high end.

The moral of the story here is that if you are going to use a phone tether as your primary internet, you need to be very aware of your data caps and what will happen if you go over (i.e., pay through the nose or get throttled to at best 10% of your normal speed, depending on provider).

And the speed capabilities given for the mobile specifications in that Wikipedia page is all listed in bits/sec, not bytes (100Mbps, 1Gbps, and so on).

That is about 10x dial-up speed (for perspective, average 4G speeds are another 20x that amount). If that is what it started at, you were throttled early and hard, because to take 32 hours you would have had to have averaged only a quarter of that.

I hate capitalism!!! They lied to me...(why would corporations do that? Lol) I'm going to upgrade from this prepaid crap, thank all of you.(and kryo you are awesome but I have a cooler avatar! lol)

If you're in America functionally your broadband choices are extremely limited. Whatever your town decided was 'ok' is pretty much what's available. And encumbent providers make damn sure no one else moves in on 'their territory' limiting your choices between A or A or A. Do some basic research as your opitons at best will be between likely 2 providers.

As for downloading the game, just install steam and when the alpha is available, you'll get a code. Register the code with Steam and you can tehn begin downloading the game.

Note though that during the alpha./btea process likely many patches will come out. These patches might be large depending. You may wish to weigh if you want to be a Founder given that you'll be a alpha/beta tester and subject to patches that may break, not work, explode, etc. Justa n FYI, being an alpha/beta tester is not for everyone. It requires a lot of patience. Waiting for 'full release' is a totally viable and reasonable choice for many people. Choose wisely.

That's not an easy question to answer.  What is your location, what are your options?

Do you have a land line? That is where I would go first. DSL gives better speeds than what you seem to be getting and it is specifically for the internet.

How about cable TV? That would be my second choice. Some cable companies have internet only options, and some (maybe all) of them offer TV/phone/internet mix or match packages.

Dish and DirectTV might also be options, but you have to be careful about any games or apps that may have dependencies on "latency". Satellite adds seconds to the time from your computer to the first internet hub in your link. This causes problems with games like WOW, where the game gets in trouble if the latency gets greater than some fraction of a second. And VOIP also does not work on a Satellite link. Since I don't know if Steam has any dependencies on latency nor do I know if GalCiv3 MP will have any latency dependencies, I can't make any suggestions either way.