AlliedModders - What do you guys think will happen when steam reaches 4 billion+ accounts

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What do you guys think will happen when steam reaches 4 billion+ accounts

Here you can see how steamId works... it's a 64bit id, but half of it is used for other stuff rather than storing actual ids, that's why the first steam account has as id the number 76561197960265729, which in binary is

HTML Code:

universe type       instance                account number

00000001 0001 00000000000000000001 00000000000000000000000000000001

only the second half means actually "1".

The first half is for identifying Universe, Type and Instance of the account.

Following that, theoretically, the last steam we can have will be 76561202255233023, which is

HTML Code:

universe type       instance                account number

00000001 0001 00000000000000000001 11111111111111111111111111111111

Steam accounts are at 1.1 billion.

So, my question is: what do you think will happen? Will they just give up the Instance part from the binary representation?

Re: What do you guys think will happen when steam reaches 4 billion+ accounts

I think that Valve will up the limit somehow, They could create a account ID second variable so accounts exceeding the 4 billion mark could be something like 2--245645254543. It would break a lot of stuff if they did this however