Shared redists folder now? (Steamworks Shared\_CommonRedist)

[Dowlphwin]

Or is this just the redists for whatever product "Steamworks" is? I was hoping this might finally be a shared source for all those multiple versions that come with so many games that waste space, but when deleting it it gets re-downloaded, even though it's the exact same folder naming.
Anyone got more info on that folder? Creation timestamp is from a couple days ago.

[Satoru]

New games can utilizes this central repository

Older games still will use their own repositories

[aiusepsi]

"Steamworks" is the name of the features which Valve offers to developers. One of these features is common redists, a set of redists that Valve manages the setup of: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/common_redist

If the developer knows they need, for example, the VC 2015 Redist, they just have to tick a box in the settings for their game in the Steam backend, and Steam would sort it out automatically.

What this used to mean was that the VC 2015 Redist content depot was mapped into the app, and so the app got their own copy of it. It looks like back in October last year, Valve implemented and set a new option: requiredefaultinstallfolder: 1[steamdb.info] which it seems, forces the redist depo to be installed in the default dir, "Steamworks Shared" rather than into the game's directory.

I guess any new installs of games which use one of these common redists (which is a lot of games, the feature has been around a while) won't install their own copy any more and will just use the shared one. Neat.

Hmm. Or there might be other things involved. I'm guessing a bit.

[Dowlphwin]

I would say if Valve didn't allow a simple way to switch old games to the new path and urged devs to update their games accordingly, that feature would have a much diminished usefulness. I got many GBs of duplicate redists on my harddisk, and that's just for the games I have installed right now.

Although there are worse offenders regarding waste of space. The Witcher 3 used the DLC system for free DLCs, but did not use that for their huge bonus content, which one always needs to store for the case of a file integrity check.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Dowlphwin:

I would say if Valve didn't allow a simple way to switch old games to the new path and urged devs to update their games accordingly, that feature would have a much diminished usefulness. I got many GBs of duplicate redists on my harddisk, and that's just for the games I have installed right now.

Although there are worse offenders regarding waste of space. The Witcher 3 used the DLC system for free DLCs, but did not use that for their huge bonus content, which one always needs to store for the case of a file integrity check.

Some devs dumped the redists manually into their depots so you can't really change that unless you go back and update the depot itself, add the new depot, etc. For older games most devs arent going to risk doing that breaking their games.