Valve has this week rolled out a major update for a number of its games including Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, and Half-life 2: Deathmatch, which now allows them to be delivered via Valve’s new SteamPipe content distribution service.

Valve SteamPipe has been designed to provide players with faster downloads, faster map load times and much faster boot times, easier distribution, installation, and management of mods.

The new SteamPipe upgrade will change how the games are downloaded and how they are stored on your computer. Valve explains:

"A one-time conversion process will occur, which will take a bit longer than the usual download. You should expect your computer to do a lot of disk work, and you will need enough free hard drive space for about two full copies of the game. (For TF, around 15GB free is recommended.) With SteamPipe, the shared Source engine files are no longer shared between games. So if you have multiple Source engine games installed, the size of disk will increase by a few GB.”

For more information on the new SteamPipe jump over to the Steam website for details and a full FAQ.

Source: Valve