Hmm, I had trouble finding official confirmation of that but did find a HN comment by scrollaway on this post who said they use “a proprietary http-based protocol called ngdp.” They also shared a document on the protocol and a commenter replied with a link to a deeper discussion of other ways to solve similar game patching distribution problems (amusingly, scrollaway also participated in that discussion).
This problem was solved in the 90s with usenet and torrents
And BitTorrent is already used to distribute games! Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute WoW, for example.
Small correction, though - BitTorrent wasn’t released until 2001.
they haven’t been using it for many years now
Hmm, I had trouble finding official confirmation of that but did find a HN comment by scrollaway on this post who said they use “a proprietary http-based protocol called ngdp.” They also shared a document on the protocol and a commenter replied with a link to a deeper discussion of other ways to solve similar game patching distribution problems (amusingly, scrollaway also participated in that discussion).