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Steam now allows you to copy games over a local network to another PC
- teddyh 4y agoVery magnanimous.
- armchairhacker 4y agoBring 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… EDIT: Of course they already have something similar, https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay. So "one day" might be sooner than I thought
- e4e5 4y agoSteam remote play?
- shaunsingh0207 4y agothat 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"
- Natsu 4y agoHuh, 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.
- HoppyHaus 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation - I was going to say that StarCraft 1 had this, but it turns out it was a whole category of games!
- Thiez 4y agoBack 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.
- bombcar 4y agoI 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.
- piperswe 4y agoI'm pretty sure that's still the case, I don't recall them making any change that would break it
- dmonitor 4y agoYeah, this is just Steam doing it automatically for you
- misnome 4y agoI remember spawn installs! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation 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>.
- zerocrates 4y agoI definitely remember seeing the "spawn install" option from the StarCraft CD and just assuming it was something to do with the comic book character.
- 4y ago
- sowbug 4y agoWhy 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.
- fbrchps 4y agoThe 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.
- ruined 4y agothere 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.
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- 908B64B197 4y agoOnly applications where I could see the tradeoffs be worth it is over satellite links. Either that or game/code assets on large college or corporate campuses.
- sowbug 4y agoThere 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.
- amaccuish 4y agoBecause that would effectively broadcast your browsing history to the LAN.
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- aquova 4y agoThey'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.
- XorNot 4y agoI 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?
- capableweb 4y agoI'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.
- bootloop 4y agoSteam 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.
- Nition 4y agoYep, 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.
- 4y ago
- stodor89 4y ago[flagged]
- ninepoints 4y agoWhy do you feel the need to write this
- CyanBird 4y agoBecause the lack of generalized Lan is exceedingly frustrating throughout the landscape of video games It really is a problem
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- bobmaxup 4y agoI can see what you are getting at, but does that really apply here?
- okamiueru 4y agoI'm not OP. but, yes? 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.
- dj_mc_merlin 4y agoI wonder if the image in the tweet was made by an AI?
- spiritplumber 4y agodid that stop working at some point?
- Baeocystin 4y agoNo, 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.
- _dain_ 4y agoI thought you could always do this?
- StreamBright 4y agoI 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.
- adamsb6 4y agoLong 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.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y agoOh YES. For a family of pc gamers, this is a huge improvement!
- nathias 4y agosteam deck is really making a lot of improvements on the whole pc gaming environment
- grujicd 4y agoSo 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.
- techaqua 4y agomake you kid another account? i family share with my friends just fine reading you post again. i think you use family sharing wrong. > Yes, I could create a new account but then I'm locked out form all the games family sharing needs multiple account
- xboxnolifes 4y agoThis happens for any game that requires you to be online. So I'll note that it shouldn't be a problem if it's a single player game.
- rstupek 4y agoI can play if I'm in offline mode without an issue when my son plays on his computer. Have you tried that?
- jamroom 4y agoYeah this is what you do - "restart in offline mode". I have my kids do this and we can all play whenever.
- goosedragons 4y agoThat 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.
- trissylegs 4y agoI remember when my Girlfriend and I were play Elder scrolls Online. I was really short on disk space at the time. (The download was also huge) So I just set up a network share on her computer for it and launched it from a network mapped drive. It just worked. I was kinda surprised. But I guess if the devs don't do anything fancy there's no reason it shouldn't work.
- Lacerda69 4y agofunny thing is I could always do this with cracked games... and much more
- ffhhj 4y agoIn 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.
- bitwize 4y agoLAN parties when?
- seam_carver 4y agoPerfect! I have relatively slow internet and multiple PCs that I install games too. Way easier than making backup files and copying to USB.
- dogma1138 4y agoYou could do it unofficially forever just copy the steam apps folder from one PC to another or back it up and manually restore it. The client would pick those up as valid installs as long as the signed in account has those games in their account.
- pjerem 4y ago> 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 :)
- dogma1138 4y agoTBH 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DiabloD3 4y agoWait, 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pdntspa 4y agoJeeze, what took them so long?
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- nullify88 4y agoA few friends used to run https://lancache.net/ 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.
- joppy 4y agoAt 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.
- neurostimulant 4y agoAll 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.
- NoPicklez 4y agoI 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.
- IYasha 4y agoBut in 90s we could just copy one game to all computers and play offline...