Steam now allows you to copy games over your local community. Here’s how to do it

What can I say? I’m a bandwidth cheapskate. Always have been, at all times will likely be. So, when I’ve the chance to obtain one thing domestically and never from the Internet, I do. And Valve’s Steam service has lastly delivered on a promise Microsoft has failed to hold for years.

Steam now allows you to “download” a recreation hosted on the Steam service from one other PC. This is an more and more helpful characteristic as customers cycle out outdated PCs, purchase Steam Decks, or just dwell in households the place a couple of PC owns a given recreation.

Are you a fan of the Steam Deck? If so, you ought to take a look at the ROG Ally, a competitor with extra energy and choices.

For years, Comcast has pushed me insane with rising costs in addition to an arbitrary knowledge cap that solely extra competitors can do away with. As a West Coast buyer, our family of 4 has a 1.2TB knowledge cap monthly whereas a number of Northeast states, the place Comcast competes with uncapped Verizon’s FiOS, get a free cross. To me, that is easy value gouging and don’t attempt to change my thoughts.

Games can generally devour nicely over 100GB value of knowledge, that means that “buying” a recreation on Steam will also be accompanied with a possible overage tax. If I exceed the Comcast knowledge cap, I pay $10 for every extra 50GB of knowledge consumed. (Other ISPs have totally different pricing plans and overage insurance policies). Managing my knowledge cap is one end-of-month process I despise.

Steam, although, now helps out in a giant method.

How to copy Steam games over your local community

Steam makes this all exceedingly easy. Navigate to the settings menu (accessible from the small “gear” icon on the primary web page or on the Downloads web page) and go to the Downloads entry if you’re not already there. At the underside of the numerous menu choices is “Game File Transfer over Local Network”—that is the choice you’re searching for. (This is a bit totally different than merely creating one other Steam folder and library, which will be performed utilizing this information).

Ideally, the choice to “allow transfers to/from my own devices” must be enabled and it ought to work. It requires each PCs to be logged into Steam and to be on the identical community. On my machine, although, this selection didn’t work and the extra permissible “Allow transfers to/from any user” was the one possibility that did something.

That possibility is a bit dangerous since any gadgets with entry to your wi-fi or wired community may obtain Steam games, however chances are high it received’t be a giant deal. You can even restrict it to Steam associates. If you’re involved, you can at all times tweak the choice as soon as the switch completes or just flip off transfers totally.

Once you start downloading a file from one other PC, you ought to see a banner on each machines, indicating that the file is being downloaded from one other PC relatively than the Steam servers. How quick the file transfers will depend on numerous components such because the velocity of each PCs, the drive, the community, and so forth. Steam initially pegged 100MB/s (800Mbits/s) as concerning the quickest most velocity. Personally, I noticed about half that with a take a look at run in my residence workplace.

For me, that’s simply high-quality. I like this characteristic due to what it saves me in {dollars}, not what it saves me in time.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The solely catch is that whereas Steam will switch the sport information, it received’t switch saved games. You’ll have to obtain these from the Steam Cloud in addition to any property or props from the Steam Workshop. Finally, you can switch games from PC to PC as you want, however you can solely switch games to a Steam Deck and never again.

Why can’t Windows do this?!

For years, I’ve been hoping that Microsoft would do this. And, for years, Windows has promised that it will—besides that it by no means has. Inside the Windows 10 and 11 Settings menu, there’s a management referred to as Delivery Optimization (Windows Update > Advanced choices > Delivery optimization) that supposedly does the very same factor. If you personal a couple of PC, Delivery Optimization ought to look first at different Windows PCs that you’re logged into for any updates. It ought to then pull them from these PCs earlier than downloading them from Microsoft’s servers.

With the entire PCs which have come via my workplace, I’ve by no means seen this occur as soon as. Not a single time, ever.

It’s potential that there’s some hidden management that I haven’t enabled. It’s additionally potential that Delivery Optimization’s time has handed—maybe the code Microsoft is providing one PC differs barely than one other, in order that it can’t be reproduced. I’m uncertain, although. Occam’s Razor suggests its builders received sidetracked and hoped we’d all simply overlook about it.

I don’t need to overlook about it, although. Delivery Optimization is a good characteristic and I would like it to work on Windows. Steam simply beat it to the punch.