Downloading from friends pc

[Skulcollektor23]

Hi I am new to PC gaming my Internet at home is terrible and was wondering if I could get a step by step as to how I could download my games to an external drive on a friends pc then put them on my pc. Thanks in advance!

[Ogami]

Easy, download and install the games at your friend, go into the Steam library folder under Steam/steamapps/common which has all the game folders.
Choose the game you want, copy it over to an external drive or USB stick.
Now this is IMPORTANT, go into the Steam/steamapps folder ( the one before "common").
You will see a bunch of files called appmanifest_XXXXXX with the X being different numbers.
Each installed game has its own appmanifest file and it tells Steam that the game is installed.
You need to find the correct appmanifest file number for the games you copy over.
Just google them or look in the store, the number is always the same as the app number in the browser adress for the store page of the game.

So for example for Darksiders 3 the store page is
https://store.steampowered.***/app/606280/Darksiders_III/
so the correct appmanifest you would need to look for would be appmanifest_606280.

You need to copy over the correct appmanifest for the games you want to transfer and copy them over to the same location on your own pc, so game folders to steam/steamapps/common and the appmanifest to steam/steamapps.

Then just restart Steam and voila, the game will appear as fully installed and ready to play in your library.

You can do that for every game you want.

[Mazuzu]

similar question a few years later.

we have multiple people with their own steam accounts. can we download games on one account and transfer the data to the other accounts?

To be absolutely clear: all accounts own the game.

The bandwidth to download a 100GB game 3 or 4x on our network is not reasonable.

I would expect that the backup and restore games method has replaced the whole appmanifest manual method described above and have used that for transferring games from one computer to another for the same steam account. My question is whether we can do this (backup) from one account and (restore) to many accounts.

[Cathulhu]

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE43
Yes, you can. And even easier than the clunky backup system.

[Viking2121]

Its easy, I still do this even though I have decent internet now, I got a big HDD thats only for steam games, if I work on my brothers PC for example, he owns the game I got backed up already, I just move it over from my shared network drive onto his PC and at most it has to download is a little update.