They've been rumored to be working on this for some time; I think it's an excellent feature. I know people who live in areas with poor internet speed, and this type of thing is a godsend. It may seem simple to people on here how to simply transfer game files or set up a network cache, but to many users it's akin to dark magic.
Steam had an option to recover a game from a backup for a long time. If you really needed this you knew about it. This new feature seems to just save a few clicks and the need for a shared drive / flash drive.
It still doesn't help me with games releasing a 20 GB patch every 7 days unfortunately.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work so well with some larger games. I tried backing up a 120GB up-to-date game, uninstalling and reinstalling steam (to a newly purchased drive), and reloading the game from backup. It still wanted to download 90GB.
Yep, back around 15 years ago when I had data caps I used to use that feature all the time. Not to copy games between PCs, but to have backups in case I reinstalled Windows etc so I wouldn't have to download them again.
The feature's still there: Right-click a game in your library -> Properties -> Local Files tab -> Backup game files.
It creates sort of an installer with all the files in it. It's less useful in these days of frequent patches though, because the game will still have to download any newer updates after installing.
I'm one of those people. I have a gaming PC filled with games and a Steam Deck with some games. Some of the things I want to play on the Steam Deck I've yet to play just because the download would take forever (intermittent internet access combined with horrible latency and terrible bandwidth). Really happy about this feature.
I don't know, the issue I think I have is how come it took so long? GCF files are handled pretty well in Steam already, so how was this not just enabling local service discovery and serving HTTP?
For quite some time you could do this manually without much trouble, but you did need to know a few obscure steps to do it right. Basically a matter of finding the ID of the game so you can copy a certain metadata file along with the actual game data.
I used the trick to copy some games to my Steam Deck back in the Fall. I speculated then that they might make this a genuine feature since it's so simple. I'm glad to see it happened.
Steam has had a dedicated feature for this for a decade now. Except it didn't do it over the network, just files which you had to provide transport for yourself
This is different than the backup feature, behaves extremely differently. The backup feature is so insanely slow that restoring from a typical USB media a 120GB game takes longer than downloading that same game on 100mbps internet connection.
This method I'm referring to (and probably what they will codify) is much, much faster.
Back in the day (must be 15 years ago?) at lan parties we would share steam game files locally if someone already had it installed. If the files were present locally in the correct forder, the client would be smart enough to skip to verifying the download.
I remember spawn installs! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation - games came with the ability to install multiple multiplayer-only copies so that you only needed one copy of the game to play. This was invaluable for LAN parties but also families - this list certainly dominated the games that I played with my siblings.
It so often feels like things are moving backward <Old man continues to yell at clouds>.
Oh, I totally agree; I just don't think it's likely that Blizzard will be making another Warcraft RTS any time soon, and if they do, the story will either be some complete side-story with much smaller stakes, or they'll expect you to have at least some familiarity with the WoW story to understand it.
There's no need to yell at this particular cloud. Similar licenses still exist. For example, "It Takes Two" only requires one player to own the license. ...so does the "Jackbox Party Pack".
Also there are many local-coop games that can be played through Nvidia Gamestream. I played "Rayman Legends", and "Lovers in A Dangerous Spacetime" this way.
I remember CD games where it was MUCH faster to copy the install directory over the network than wait for the installed to decompress everything. And then a quick repair and you were good to go.
> If the files were present locally in the correct forder, the client would be smart enough to skip to verifying the download.
It still is; I just replaced the boot drive in my PC, pointed Steam at my already-installed library (on a secondary drive) and installed the games with no downloads necessary (other than updates for some games).
We would ask everyone to have the game installed and updated before they arrive, however inevitably the events would turn into "install parties". I still miss those days, though; if nothing else because I had more time and patience.
Steam is pretty robust.
If delete everything but steam.exe and the steamapps dir. Launching steam.exe will basically just reinstall steam in place and have all your Games there.
Bring back DS download play! Maybe one day they’ll let you play with others who don’t have the game, using this to install a temporary multiplayer-only copy…
that isn't quite the same, ds download play sent a small multiplayer-only to the guest device, independent of the host device. Remote play merely streams your whole session over.
The only thing close for the PC market I can think of is It Takes Two and its "Friends Pass"
Huh, I was just thinking of that myself, but I didn't know Steam already had this feature. It's a great idea and something I'd like to make more use of.
Why wasn't this functionality ever baked into the web? HEAD requests could return a SHA hash of the content, and browsers would check peers before issuing a GET for the remote resource.
The security implications of "find me another device on this network who has gone to a specific page" are immense.
Not to mention accessing account-related information due to improper no-cache headers on the website.
There are lots of grade schools with slow internet, and when OS updates come out, all the kids open their school laptops and get prompted to update, which basically ends the class immediately because the slow pipe can't service 25 identical hundred-megabyte downloads quickly.
there are plenty of more plausible misconfiguration risks that we accept, or consider the operators responsible. i'm not sure why you would take issue with this one.
additionally, content-addressing provides another layer of security beyond location addressing. even improperly cached information is as secure as your hashing algorithm.
It's not exactly the same, but back in the days before "SSL all the things!" became the norm, it was common to have transparent Squid caching proxies on local networks. If a peer on your network had recently requested a web resource, it was very likely that it was still in the Squid cache, and it would be loaded from there, instead of going to the origin server.
Yes, it was a pain whenever the origin server had misconfigured caching headers. The "force reload bypassing caches" shortcut (Shift-Control-R, or Shift-Click-Reload-Button) was always handy. The move to TLS everywhere, which killed these "transparent" (when they worked) caching proxies, made the web much more stable and predictable.
Seems like it would only work in a very benign network environment. The first thing 4chan would do is to write a "peer" that answers yes for every SHA it gets and then sends over porn instead. Hope all your network software re-verifies the hash for every file you get! There is also the massive privacy leak of asking for the SHA of a certain file only found on specific websites and then seeing who has it.
HTTP is just inherently server-client, decreasing load on servers by sharing between clients was not a design goal.
If you read some of the original documents about the web, you'll see that it was one of the ideas. It never made it further than being an idea though.
Although IPFS seems to want to implement something like that, and probably much easier to do in a content-addressable way (like IPFS). So content has a hash, and as long as you trust the source of the hash, you can download the content of a hash from anywhere, even your drunk and slightly annoying neighbor that you don't actually trust, because you can verify that you got the right bytes after all.
Bittorrent does it for transfers already, and it works alright, so why not for the web too?
if you have enough people (2, with similar interests at minimum, or a satellite office of workers, etc) a perimiter web proxy is a great way to help get a lot of this behavior. so long as you dont have secrets, it works great
At LAN parties we used to share our SteamApps folders so that others could copy games across. Interestingly (perhaps due to Windows networking handling copy-many-small-files poorly?) it was often faster to make an uncompressed ZIP of the files, copy that over the network, and unzip it on the other side.
Great to see that the steam client now does all this transparently.
All file transfer protocols that copy files one by one suffer work poorly with many small files. The more latency you have, the worst the slowdown. rsync is great for this purpose because it can do batch transfer efficiently, including compressing the data on the fly.
In the meanwhile Steam's "backup and restore games" option doesn't really work, games are redownloaded anyways. The only way around is copying from steamapps both the game's folder and its appmanifest file.
> just copy the steam apps folder from one PC to another
Ironically, in 2023, this still isn’t a solved problem.
I have a MacBook and a Linux PC at home, my work laptop is under Windows and I have a Steam deck my phone is an iPhone (but an Android wouldn’t change anything).
Let’s be honest : sharing a file between those computers is never easy. I still manage to do it but it’s only because I’m "good" at computers.
I’d be totally unable to explain to my mother on the phone how to exchange a file between multiple computers. This adventure always prematurely ends with one or multiple emails to herself.
And to be honest it’s a shame in 2023. Maybe 15 years ago, we had some standard file transfer protocol via Bluetooth which maybe was flaky but was kinda universal and which could have been improved, for example by allowing some standard upgrade over Wi-Fi for compatible devices.
For this I blame Apple who decided to go alone on this path, and the Android stupid UX which somehow decided that disabling Bluetooth and NFC was so useful that you needed to be able to do it with one tap while people didn’t even knew what Bluetooth and NFC meant just because they learnt somewhere that it saved battery juice (spoiler : it hardly saved anything).
tl:dr; long rant about file transfers and the shameful state of standard protocols, sorry I needed to vent my decade long frustration :)
TBH it’s rather easy now if everyone is using Windows and or have OneDrive installed right click on any file and click share with onedrive.
Other than that you need to teach people how to share via the local network which isn’t terrible but requires some basic knowledge to set it up initially.
But overall yes the experience of sharing files between one computer and another can be terrible especially if you don’t want to drastically decrease their security posture.
I am more and more inclined to purchase things that I can hold in my hand or have it in the room with me and does not require internet connection to function.
I think we need to pause and just appreciate that Steam are building this in. Perhaps they've had it for a while in other forms, but bringing it to the Steam platform is excellent.
In a world where it seems like we're constantly downloading more and more, its refreshing to see a company try to curb that.
I don't have a use for it myself, but I think its great.
Long ago I had setup lancache for this purpose, which is strictly inferior. Not only can chunks be evicted from cache, but it seemed like there were a lot of cache misses even when testing re-downloading the same game.
Though lancache does still have one plus over this method: when I boot from Linux to Windows there's still a chance I might not have to re-download chunks.
A few friends used to run https://lancache.net/ to cache the traffic between the steam cliemt and their cdn. Its nice this feature is made accessible to all but there still remains cases where lan cache maybe preferable.
No, it still works. I do exactly that regularly. It's particularly useful if you're playing around with mods- you keep a vanilla copy of the game folder on standby so that you can pave over your mistakes with ease.
So this feature seems to be target to family sharing PCs? I really hate Steam's family sharing. It seemed a great idea. I could purchase some games for kids on my account and they could play on their separate PC. I fully expected that I can't run same game on two PCs if I purchased just a single license. What I totally didn't expect was that if kid is playing any single game from my library, I can't play anything else on my PC! Two entirely different games, with two full paid licenses can't be played at the same time.
This policy moved Steam from "oh it's so convenient" to "ugh, I won't purchase anything ever again on the Steam". Yes, I could create a new account but then I'm locked out form all the games I already purchased.
Now if I'm buying a game the first thing I'm looking is if there's is a non-Steam version.
>policy moved Steam from "oh it's so convenient" to "ugh, I won't purchase anything ever again on the Steam"
Ha. Even without family sharing Steam is still the best platform for game purchases. Family sharing not being what you want hardly invalidates the rest of the platform.
I always saw family sharing as something for a family that shares a single PC, letting the family only have to purchase one copy of the game for the household.
It's an irritating policy because it illuminates the fact that you don't actually own the games. If you actually owned two games you could play them on two separate systems, while being logged out of steam.
I need neither a CD drive nor to store tons of plastic slabs with easily-scratching discs inside, nor to swap discs just to play a different game. Nor to go downtown to buy new ones.
It's a lot better in many ways, even if not specifically in sharing.
I wont argue it is better, but you can do this with some games on steam using offline mode if the game supports other methods of multi-player outside of steam.
This seems like a "me too" comment, but I agree on family sharing being fairly poor for most (IMO) families. I still love steam, but I was really excited to share my library of 300 games with my son who just got a steam deck (like I could easily do if I had hard-copies), but no. We have to take turns playing (different games). Now we need to be creative whose account owns which game when making purchase.
Also kind of frustrated any time I see someone complain about this, there is a horde of people saying "you're wrong and greedy, steam is awesome".
I realize doing this the "right" way might be impractical from a licensing standpoint (or people cheating the system). It still pales in comparison to hard-copies though in this regard.
This is something that Apple gets really right, and that Valve and Microsoft (I don't have experience with Sony or Nintendo family ecosystems) get really wrong.
I can't even buy multiple copies of a co-op game on the family Steam account that the family can use to play together.
Doesn't Apple's family sharing have a big problem with IAPs not being shared? So maybe you get the base game (but maybe not if it's an IAP on a free title) but not the expansions?
The consoles all have a pretty similar system at this point. You get a master console where it can play everything offline/online and any user account can access anything the account set the console as master owns and then you can log into another console and use everything the account owns while online. There might be minor differences among platforms but that's the jist of it. It's kinda bad for Nintendo Switch with the second system being a handheld though. Still better than Steam's. In the good ol' days Sony allowed you to have 5 PS3s and there was no difference but it got abused so they cut it to two.
> The consoles all have a pretty similar system at this point.
Not on Xbox, which is my primary gaming device. Here's how the "home console" feature works today:
> "Xbox home console is an existing feature that allows you to share games and content with other people who sign in to your home console with their profile. However, it’s limited to that device, so friends and family must sign in to the console you identify as your home Xbox to access those benefits."
On the bright side, something new called "Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family" is coming. It provides an Apple-like experience for games on Game Pass, which is a good start:
> "When you share with Friends & Family, the primary account holder and up to four additional members each get their own unique access to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate games, content, and benefits, regardless of what device they play on. All the people you invite can play at the same time, even the same game."
Isn't Xbox home console exactly what I described as a master console? That console can play whatever offline and other users can use that content linked to that account. Then you can login into that account on a friend's console or a second console and use that accounts games while online? So you can have two games from one account being played simultaneously online which is not doable on Steam.
> Then you can login into that account on a friend's console or a second console and use that accounts games while online?
As the FAQ I quoted above appears to confirm, you can share games with other profiles, but only on the single device blessed as the "home console".
Of course, you can always pass physical discs around. IIRC, for digital purchases there's a convoluted way to use a single purchase with multiple profiles on multiple devices, but not at the same time. In other words, co-op requires multiple copies of a game. If purchased digitally, they must be bought using separate profiles since one profile can't buy a game twice.
It's quite possible I'm wrong about some facet(s) of this. Hopefully "Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family" fixes this, but if it only fixes the problem for Game Pass games I'm not sure how much value it'll have for me.
Yes, but you can log into another console with the same account and play the titles you own so long as you're online and logged in. So you can play a game you bought on your account while someone else plays a game bought on your account on the home console. So two consoles simultaneously.
What some people do is they set their friend's Xbox as their home console and their friend sets their Xbox as their home console and then they both just stay logged in and online on their respective consoles. This lets them play all their friend's games but they can still play their own.
I think if you try this for a co-op scenario you'll find that it will fail, but it's possible it just failed for everything we tried. In any case, setting someone else's device to be our home console is a non-starter for me. Thanks for digging in with me on this, though!
> I can't even buy multiple copies of a co-op game on the family Steam account that the family can use to play together.
If you're using Steam Big Picture, you can leave multiple accounts logged in to every device and buy games on them; I did this when I ran fighting game tournaments during COVID--accounts named [channel]1, [channel]2, and so on. (Why you can't do this with the desktop UI is certainly a wart, though.)
Given this, rearchitecting their infrastructure (which pretty universally considers a single account a single active user) for a fairly niche case is probably low on the list.
> If you're using Steam Big Picture, you can leave multiple accounts logged in to every device and buy games on them…
I'm not sure I understand. Is your idea that instead of per-person accounts, you would create new accounts for subsequent copies, and then the family would work out who logs in as what user?
> Given this, rearchitecting their infrastructure (which pretty universally considers a single account a single active user) for a fairly niche case is probably low on the list.
Families wanting to play co-op games together is a niche?
> I'm not sure I understand. Is your idea that instead of per-person accounts, you would create new accounts for subsequent copies, and then the family would work out who logs in as what user?
Yep - that is the intended behavior at present, near as I can tell. Swap accounts as necessary.
> Families wanting to play co-op games together is a niche?
No, but hotdesking and a licensing service is something I don't think I've ever heard friends with kids ask for. (Steam has a licensed/hotdesked model for businesses, where that is a more common thing.)
It's an interesting idea, but I don't want to buy a copy for every family member when we'll never use more than 2 simultaneously.
> No, but hotdesking and a licensing service…
Steam Family Library Sharing already checks that there's an available license, and that it's not currently in use. I just want the ability to buy multiple licenses.
Or better yet, I'd prefer that Valve and other game app stores do what Apple does, and allow users within families to play whatever's "on the shelf", separately or together.
Im not saying that you’re wrong for wanting to be able to buy multiple copies but I’m curious as to what you’re reasoning is for not just having separate accounts for the people in your family.
Family members do have separate accounts, and I'd very much like to keep it that way. That is, I don't want to buy a copy for Billy's account and then another for Suzy's account — I want to buy, say, one additional copy (license, really) for the family library so that anybody can co-op with each other.
Xbox game pass is actually pretty good about this. You can play Xbox games on your pc on your main account and someone else can play the same game on an Xbox. I can play a game on Xbox cloud gaming on my steam deck while someone plays the same game on my Xbox. This is fantastic with multiplayer games. I haven’t tried with games that aren’t part of the subscription library but it would slightly surprise me if that didn’t work the same.
That only helps in the scenario somebody wants to play offline. If one person wants to play CoD: Black Ops online while the other plays Halo MCC online you can't.
If you grant someone Family Sharing access, and then revoke it, you can't grant it again for 90 days. This is presumably to prevent it from becoming Friend Sharing.
The issue is without family sharing, you can't share games. But with it enabled if you both own a certain game, it gets confused and only 1 of you can play it at a time.
Well, grujicd considers Steam Family Share to be so broken that he no longer wants to buy games on Steam. That’s fair. What doesn’t make any sense is why he just doesn’t disable it if he hates it so much?
I guess I hate it because I believed marketing term "family sharing" and did not realize it's "family sharing with caveats and significant limitations". With that incorrect belief I bought a number of games for both kids and myself before I realized full impact of these limitations.
What's worse, even with hindsight I'm not sure how a parent should organize 2-3 accounts to allow all what "family sharing" implies. And consider that kid now plays some Mario game but in a year or two would play Wolfenstein, so it's not easy to separate by "my" and "their" games.
> And you sound exactly like the kind of person who would just take advantage of this and ruin it for the rest of us- since you are already complaining about something free.
This is a bit harsh if not straight offensive. I reckon you don’t have kids, you’re building your Steam library for yourself?
In my opinion, I had a perfectly valid expectation that if I paid full licenses for 2 different games, I’d be able to play both of them at the same time on two PCs. You know, like in old CD/DVD days. Steam was supposed to be superior to that, not inferior?
Sure, some games can work in offline mode, but not all of them.
> they implement something that ONLY HELPS and you never want to buy from them again.
Once you make a mistake to purchase some games for kids using your existing account, you can’t go back. Family sharing doesn’t help you any more, it creates problems. I can’t buy Flight Simulator on Steam just for myself, even if it won’t be ever shared with kids. They’ll kick me out if they want unrelated game from a library.
Few days ago we had a family meeting to decide how to purchase Hogwarts Legacy, talking into consideration which kid plays which games on which accounts, should it be Steam, Epic, on kids account or mine… It felt bizare. I bought it on Epic at the end. Not that Epic is better in this regard, it’s just that kids have separate accounts there from the start. Notice that we want to play on single computer, no sharing whatsover, fully priced $59 license, but there’s still a risk it won’t work if other kid plays let’s say Among Us on another PC. Should we create a new account for new game? Will we be banned? I even wanted to buy it on DVD for these reasons but it was not an option. How is this user friendly?
This is a cautinary story for future parents, or for those whose kids will be gamers in a year or two.
> And you sound exactly like the kind of person who would just take advantage of this and ruin it for the rest of us- since you are already complaining about something free.
They said they wanted to share among their family. Your interpretation assumes more aggressive and less reasonable behavior. My guess is that while such friend sharing is a risk, it's unlikely to be from families like the poster above. In fact I doubt such sharing would widespread since many folks want trophies and trading cards in their own accounts.
Consider also that with disc media family and friends can pass around games. That didn't ruin gaming before digital allowed publishers to lock up reasonable consumer rights.
Wait, they stopped me before? I've always backed up my Steam library to my NAS just so I don't have to download 1+ TB if my Windows box decides to explode and take the drive and/or filesystem with it.
Steam is DRM. Before DRM, this process was solved very easily by copying over files.
What this adds is convenience. Which, I suppose is OK. But, in many ways, "buying games" used to come with some flexibility that we gave up for convenience.
I don't think OP suggest what valve is doing is a bad move. Just that, nostalgically, it used to be quite good. But, nothing stops us from buying games on GoG instead, and just copying over install files the "good old way" either.
But.....you still can just "copy over files" if you really want to bring over the good old 2002-like flow. Just copy over files from another machine, then start the install process, steam will realize it already has all the files and will finish instantly, done. I've done this many times.
Steam does not enforce digital rights management unless the distributer wants it. Many games that can be executed from their own directories without Steam even active agree with this. Steam is first and foremost a software distribution platform.
This copying concept has actually been possible by hand for some time, whether by using the Backup feature or by way of just copying data from the commons directory of the installation.
The only way steam is not itself a DRM is if copying installed steam files is a facsimile of everything the game needs and expects. I do not think that all "DRM-free" games in steam are excluded from making some kind of necessary system changes as part of its install process. Be that changes to registry, or the likes.
In other words, if the install process is necessary, then steam itself acts as a DRM, even for otherwise DRM free games, as you cannot easily copy the install files. Or, at least, not to my knowledge at least.
And inevitably CDs would become unreadable or lost and one could no longer play the game. I remember one of my Baldur's Gate 2 CDs having a crack from the centre to the edge after suffering an unfortunate fall.
You can manually copy over the game files even with Steam. That has always worked. Steam even offers an export option in case you don't know how to find the directory yourself.
The problem isn't the copying part itself, it's getting access to the files. Windows network sharing isn't enabled by default, modern Windows even disables network discovery by default. Even when you enable it, you might not be able to access another Windows computer if it's running a passwordless account.
What Steam is doing is automating the access control. No longer do you need to start configuring your OS accounts and setting up network shares. Now it just works.
The only way this was true was when cracks were a thing. Most games had some sort of copy protection before (and often after) steam. I couldn't imagine a community of idiots downloading untrusted exes these days...
We need Indie games to work on this. Triple A studios won’t tolerate it. Probably going to be very cheap to make indie games soon, with cheap generative AI.
