60,440 pre-orders, will beta-release flood servers?

Day one servers will probably be private/invite/friends only.
Many people will want to garner knowledge and experience in single player.

Download servers are fine on steam. Tens of thousands of people use them every day. Since Starbound's release is not only in America, its not one server getting hit. Even if it was U.S./U.K/E.U. release only, that's still more than one server. It'll be fine, come on!

 

I disagree. The Aliens Colonial Marines release stopped their download servers for a few hours and then it ran really slow for several more hours. This was a game that did not do well and still locked up. Brink had huge hype and on release the stress stopped their server from working (10kb/s is not working) and I couldn't play that for almost a 24 hours. After those 2 games and the failure that is Borderlands 2 I swore to never pre-order again so I don't know about most other games on release day, just saying the Steam servers are not invincible.

 

Some Steam games did a pre-load thingy (you load most of data before game is released and at release it downloads only any last-minute patches), sadly that feature isn't used as often as it should

I wouldn't worry tho, problems generally show up on 1+ milion release, on steam scale 100k is considered "medium", if not small.

That if it won't hit some huge bubble and suddenly become so popular (which I hope it will) that there will be milion downloads on day 1

 

My thoughts exactly.

With that said, it wouldn't be the first or last game, indie or heavily backed, that has had its servers crashed at launch. It's practically expected in this age. The only time it's really the fault of the developer is when the problem could have been mitigated or outright avoided had it not been for some boneheaded decision they made. See: Diablo 3.

 

I would be surprised if the game is over 100MB. Generated worlds on the other hand will likely exceed, 1GB very quickly if you travel a lot. Sounds will be 90% of the games size, and depending on the quality/bitrate they use the game will likely be 50MB to 200MB at most. Terraria is only 16MB for reference. The core aspects of these games don't use much... and the game will be downloaded by the majority from Steam. Steam releases AAA games, that are over 10GB, have millions of downloads over the first few days, and their servers handle it fine.

Chance of servers being hammered because of Starbound: 0

 

Not a fat chance, I'm sure there are AAA titles that triple that number easily that get handled just fine. People forget/don't care about getting the game first day/ect.

I'm sure steam can handle 60k people or more.