Peer 2 Peer steam game download on the LAN

[Born2Goon]

I would love it if computer-A in my home could download an installed game from computer-B in my home over my LAN rather than get it from steam. Sometimes I use a usb-drive to copy the game over but this doesn't always work and is not convenient.

The utility of this request for me is: I'd keep 600g of steam games (between my son and I we probably have that) installed on my big-PC which has a 1TB hard drive. I'd leave it on with a steam account logged in.

Then when I install Left4Dead2 on my laptop's tiny SSD for the afternoon, it gets it from the big-PC instead of Steam. My wifi's max bandwidth is 54mpbs, my internet connection to steam maxes at 2mpbs.

Also if a friend comes over to LAN-party and downloads a game that we have: they'd get it from my local p2p "steamcloud."

If I wanted to have a massive LAN-Party at work where we have a 40-station comp lab, I'd get the games installed on one computer and then steam would basically p2p it out to the others.

You save bandwidth (and thus money), I save time. Win-win! Just steal the code from bittorrent imo!

[schnitzeljaeger]

Or you could just share the steamapps folder ;)

[76561198079142330]

so good idea but many people don't want to let VALVE use their PC to be cloud. They might disagree about using their resources

[bukkakesteve]

I think it's a good idea provided that everyone who downloads the game from your "steamcloud" has paid for the game.

[Metalface MK1]

You could create a backup of the game on PC1 then give the backup files from PC1 and restore them onto PC2

[Spawn of Totoro]

Like others have said, just cipy the files over. You don't have to get them from Steam and it isn't against the TOS/TOU to do this. My wife and I do it all the time when we buy the same game. It saves on our bandwidth cap (250GB/mo).

As for freinds, you can do the same thing. If you expect it to happen a lot, then copy it to a disk or other media. I know several people with slow connections that have others do this for them so they don't have to wait 8 hours for a 5 GB file.

As long as they legaly own the game, it is fine.

[Born2Goon]

Yep, I know I can copy the steamapps folder. I just wonder why they don't code this into steam to increase convenience for us and save themselves bandwidth.

[schnitzeljaeger]

Originally posted by Folken:

Yep, I know I can copy the steamapps folder. I just wonder why they don't code this into steam to increase convenience for us and save themselves bandwidth.

I believe this is a feature only a minority of users would appreciate. The time to code and maintain it is simply not worth it.

[Born2Goon]

Must be. Well there's my suggestion. Probably not worth it!

I have an old PC too weak to play games. I'm thinking maybe I should slap linux on it, hide it in a closet but hook it up to the network and just upload the steamapps folder directories from my various macs/pcs in the house and keep them there to jumpstart downloads. :D

[Zodasaur]

I have this secret to share with you guys: I never uninstall my games thus i never have to redownload them!

[aiusepsi]

I think it'd be a great feature to have. Really, you can break it up into a few related sub-features:

Finding other Steam clients running on the local network
Give the Steam client the ability to act as a mini content server
Authenticate other clients to be sure they own games they're trying to download

The first feature on that list there has plenty of other potential applications beyond downloading; it could power a feature that let you chat with / see the status of other players who are on your local network, for example. You'd probably want to use something like SSDP (as Bittorrent does).

The authentication bit is a feature that already exists; it's used for doing authentication in peer-to-peer games.

Letting Steam act like a mini content server is also relatively straight-forward. Under the new content system, the content server is essentially a web server, and implementing a very simple web server is relatively easy.

Then on the client end it's relatively easy to integrate, just add the discovered local servers to the head of the internal list of servers used for downloading by the client.

Then boom, you can get both newly installed games and updates from other clients, pretty much painlessly.

[Matt]

+1 for me, this would save a lot of time!

[BeardyDude]

Originally posted by schnitzeljaeger:

Originally posted by Folken:

Yep, I know I can copy the steamapps folder. I just wonder why they don't code this into steam to increase convenience for us and save themselves bandwidth.

I believe this is a feature only a minority of users would appreciate. The time to code and maintain it is simply not worth it.

A minority? Student or young professional house shares? University dorms? A win win, steam saves bandwidth on a huge scale and people get games quicker.

No idea why it's been this long and we still don't have it!

[wuddih]

Originally posted by Beardydude:

No idea why it's been this long and we still don't have it!

probably because client end solutions make way more sense.
https://blog.multiplay.co.uk/2014/04/lancache-dynamically-caching-game-installs-at-lans-using-nginx/

[BeardyDude]

Originally posted by wuddih:

Originally posted by Beardydude:

No idea why it's been this long and we still don't have it!

probably because client end solutions make way more sense.
https://blog.multiplay.co.uk/2014/04/lancache-dynamically-caching-game-installs-at-lans-using-nginx/

I've seen this, it's an impractical and unsupported solution for 99.9% of multi user (ie, more than 1) environments. As well as a dedicated server and disk space to keep the cache on It also requires ongoing maintenance to keep the hostnames up to date and can be and has been broken by any number of changes in practise by steam, origin etc - hell, if it d that simple any caching proxy would work, it's not a new concept. I'm a professional IT geek with half a dozen gaming machines on the LAN and more than one server in the home, and even I haven't bothered.

A separate and supported LAN caching app, or additional features bolted onto steamCMD might be a little better, but really what's needed is local P2P or 'in home master' options on the client. Zero config local P2P that's on by default would be best and save substantial bandwidth going into universities etc just in itself.

[aiusepsi]

I've seen some evidence that they've started at least preliminary work on a LAN sync feature; there's a new console variable in Steam called @nDownloadLANPeerGroup, for example.

Although just hints have shown up in the client doesn't necessarily mean that it'll get finished and released.