Steam's giving us all more control over update downloads, mainly because the big publishers just can't stop themselves releasing 100GB+ whoppers

pcgamer.com:

Steam has begun testing new settings for game updates in the Steam Client Beta, which anyone can opt into, meaning they'll soon be added to Steam for everyone. The improvements essentially give you more granular control over when and what Steam downloads in terms of updates, and it seems to be a response to the ballooning filesizes of contemporary big-budget games.

In regards to game updates generally, Valve says Steam «continues to try to strike a balance between keeping your games ready to play and efficiently using your bandwidth.» The automatic settings that most of us will have enabled sees Steam prioritising updates for games you've recently played, and bundling together updates for games you haven't recently played for later download (and you can of course mess around with this queue and tell it to do what you want).

Valve says this is fine for «most cases,» but it's adding increased control because «some users might want to delay updating a 200GB game until they are ready to play it again in a few months, especially if they are on metered connections or have monthly bandwidth caps. For others who play the same game every night, they might want updates downloaded as soon as they are available.»

This instantly makes a lot of sense. I've had God of War: Ragnarok sitting on my PC for months now (190GB!) being updated, and all I do is keep on playing Counter-Strike 2. I want updates for the latter instantly downloaded, but I don't really need every update for Ragnarok until I decide to sit down and play it.

The new section is added to the «Downloads» tab in the Steam client, and you can set the default to «let Steam decide when to update the game (based on factors like when you last played the game, bandwidth availability, etc.) or wait to update until the game is launched.» You can also set specific game overrides by selecting «Game Properties» on titles in your library, and these overrides will be viewable in the «Downloads» section under «Manage Exceptions.»

I