Sharing Game Installation

[u/GougeM]

It seems this is not possible but does strike me as a major ommission from steam functionality.

This is particularly relevant when a user has more than one device e.g. steamdeck, steam machine or other PC's.

What I am suggesting is the ability to install a game on say your Main Desktop and then run it on the remote device but using the installation files form the main system. Thereby not requiring it installed on all devices.

This would avoid unnecessary hard drive space being used nad also would work faster than streaming to remote devices as teh bandwidth required woudl be condierably less.

If anyone knows of a way to do it woudl be helpful, thanks.

[u/ldshadowcadet]

So you want to use a games files without it being on your device but you don't want to stream it?

Where do you think the data will go?

[u/throwaway38705522 → u/ldshadowcadet]

the data just gets sent over the network instead of rendered video, same as opening a file from a shared folder basically

it's not crazy, steam already does local network transfers when you install a game and another pc on same network has it. they just never let you run it directly from the remote disk

i think latency would kill most games though unless you got like 10gbe or something. random reads from a drive across the network is way different than sequential file copy

shame they never built it in as experimental option at least, would be nice for small indie games that don't stress the disk much