CDN companies take the sting out of downloading on-demand content by caching highly used data at the edge, or pieces of the content that form a buffer when downloading large files. This delivers near-instant game downloads for subscribers.
Without CDN, packets will get dropped due to congestion, disproportionately hitting servers that are in far away data centers. This increases the demand in a limited amount of servers, resulting in seemingly insurmountable download times.
