Steam installing games without permission on second computer.

[JeraWolfe]

If Steam is installing games on your computer without permission, you probably have two computers... and no, it's not a bug or something that's only happening to you. It's happening to anyone who has two machines with the same Steam Account on it.

If you have two computers, and install steam on both of them, I've noticed steam tries to install the games you install on one computer on the other. It does so without permission.
It does so even sometimes when you've already uninstalled the game on the other computer months ago... no idea why they are installing games I haven't played or had on my computer in a while.

But the thing is. There is no way to stop this. You can't turn off automatic updating for one computer unless you turn it off for both (and that's seldom optimal.) You can't tell steam to not auto-update and update manually to fix it, because the moment you update it on one computer, it reinstalls the whole game on the second.

I use one computer for games at home, and one at work with some applications I got through steam for my work (Like Voice Attack which helps me manage my system when I'm at another station by voice, and a few graphics programs).

So having a second computer always installing a few hundred gigabytes of games EVERY DAY I have to delete them, is a pain the butt.

The only solution I've found is to leave the second work computer in offline mode, and when I have an update for one of my applications, log on, stop ALL the downloads of games I don't want installed, and then install the app, then put it back into offline mode.

Which is highly inefficient, annoying, and really making me frustrated. Since all your stettings are saved in your steam account, it doesn't differentiate between computers on updating or installing games. It automatically installs games remotely... even though you CANNOT login to steam from either computer without it noticing one is not the usual login (forcing you to have to do the email verification, which I'm fine with). But if they can see they're not the same computer, maybe they could add something so that the games are authorized on a per machine basis. Or put in a checkmark that says, "Do not synch this machine with other machines I login into steam with."

Fix this, Valve. Soon.

If anyone knows a fix, please post it here, that would be massively appreciated. As far as I know, there isn't one, but I would love to be wrong on that.

Cheers.

~Jera

[ReBoot]

Looks like you're trxing to install games for streamimg instead of locally. Fix that by installing locally.

You can also disable game streaming all together if you don't plan on using it.

[Lithurge]

I had Steam running on two PC's for a long time and never had it install games where I didn't want them to be, so I'd say ReBoot has it right, you've got something set incorrectly.

[Kargor]

There is definitely something funny going on; Steam doesn't even have an option to "sync" your installations or something like that.

[ KARR™]

Never had this in 10+ years using multiple computers.

[davidb11]

Wouldn't the best solution be to turn off the other computer, so Steam literally can't even access it?
That seems like the best idea.

That being said, this is not something I've heard of before, so it seems like a strange glitch for certain.

[Gothacka]

I noticed when I start downloading a gmae on one PC, it also says 'downloading' on my other PC in the game library list, however when you go to the downloads screen there's nothing shown there, and the game doesn't actually install on the other pc. I fixed this by turning off 'remote play'.