Steam has a hidden setting that lets you download games way faster

Have you ever wondered why your Steam games seem to download at a rate much, much slower than your internet is capable of?

Not to flex or anything, but I just upgraded my internet a few weeks ago. Even though I should be hitting download speeds of about 300mb now, I noticed something odd; my Steam games seemed to be capped at around 30mb.

So, what’s the deal? Is Valve limiting the download speeds on Steam or something?

Turns out, yeah. But it also turns out that there’s a pretty easy way to uncap your download speeds, too.

Over in an article by GameRant’s M. Salman Shahid, there are a bunch of handy tips for beefing up your Steam download speeds, but here are the most important ones.

First up, and here’s the big one, head on over to the Steam Settings page and then mosey on over to the Downloads tab.

From here, there are two options you’ll want to untick. The most important one is the “Limit download speed”, because, unsurprisingly, this limits your download speeds.

The other one is the “Throttle downloads while streaming” option. Obviously this one is handy to leave ticked if you do stream, but it does have quite a hefty impact on your speeds when you do.

Finally, this one can be a bit tricky to figure out for yourself, but it can be a lifechanger: the “Download region” setting.

As Shahid notes, Steam will automatically select your download region for you. 95% of the time, it’s probably selected the perfect region for you already… but there is still a chance it got it wrong.

Messing around with your download region will require some trial and error, and potentially even a little geographical knowledge.

If you do attempt to mess around with this one, just make sure you keep a note of what your original download region was set as beforehand (just in case you make it even worse by accident).