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They've been rumored to be working on this for some time; I think it's an excellent feature. I know people who live in areas with poor internet speed, and this type of thing is a godsend. It may seem simple to people on here how to simply transfer game files or set up a network cache, but to many users it's akin to dark magic.
Steam had an option to recover a game from a backup for a long time. If you really needed this you knew about it. This new feature seems to just save a few clicks and the need for a shared drive / flash drive.

It still doesn't help me with games releasing a 20 GB patch every 7 days unfortunately.

I'm one of those people. I have a gaming PC filled with games and a Steam Deck with some games. Some of the things I want to play on the Steam Deck I've yet to play just because the download would take forever (intermittent internet access combined with horrible latency and terrible bandwidth). Really happy about this feature.
I don't know, the issue I think I have is how come it took so long? GCF files are handled pretty well in Steam already, so how was this not just enabling local service discovery and serving HTTP?
For quite some time you could do this manually without much trouble, but you did need to know a few obscure steps to do it right. Basically a matter of finding the ID of the game so you can copy a certain metadata file along with the actual game data.

I used the trick to copy some games to my Steam Deck back in the Fall. I speculated then that they might make this a genuine feature since it's so simple. I'm glad to see it happened.

> I know people who live in areas with poor internet speed

Me. :)

Back in the day (must be 15 years ago?) at lan parties we would share steam game files locally if someone already had it installed. If the files were present locally in the correct forder, the client would be smart enough to skip to verifying the download.
I remember spawn installs! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation - games came with the ability to install multiple multiplayer-only copies so that you only needed one copy of the game to play. This was invaluable for LAN parties but also families - this list certainly dominated the games that I played with my siblings.

It so often feels like things are moving backward <Old man continues to yell at clouds>.

I remember CD games where it was MUCH faster to copy the install directory over the network than wait for the installed to decompress everything. And then a quick repair and you were good to go.
> If the files were present locally in the correct forder, the client would be smart enough to skip to verifying the download.

It still is; I just replaced the boot drive in my PC, pointed Steam at my already-installed library (on a secondary drive) and installed the games with no downloads necessary (other than updates for some games).

I'm pretty sure that's still the case, I don't recall them making any change that would break it
We would ask everyone to have the game installed and updated before they arrive, however inevitably the events would turn into "install parties". I still miss those days, though; if nothing else because I had more time and patience.
Steam is pretty robust. If delete everything but steam.exe and the steamapps dir. Launching steam.exe will basically just reinstall steam in place and have all your Games there.
There is and has been also option to make backups from steam games. And then install those on other machines.
Bring back DS download play! Maybe one day they’ll let you play with others who don’t have the game, using this to install a temporary multiplayer-only copy…

EDIT: Of course they already have something similar, https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay. So "one day" might be sooner than I thought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation - I was going to say that StarCraft 1 had this, but it turns out it was a whole category of games!
Steam remote play?
Huh, I was just thinking of that myself, but I didn't know Steam already had this feature. It's a great idea and something I'd like to make more use of.
I remember when my Girlfriend and I were play Elder scrolls Online. I was really short on disk space at the time. (The download was also huge)

So I just set up a network share on her computer for it and launched it from a network mapped drive.

It just worked. I was kinda surprised. But I guess if the devs don't do anything fancy there's no reason it shouldn't work.

Why wasn't this functionality ever baked into the web? HEAD requests could return a SHA hash of the content, and browsers would check peers before issuing a GET for the remote resource.
The security implications of "find me another device on this network who has gone to a specific page" are immense. Not to mention accessing account-related information due to improper no-cache headers on the website.
It's not exactly the same, but back in the days before "SSL all the things!" became the norm, it was common to have transparent Squid caching proxies on local networks. If a peer on your network had recently requested a web resource, it was very likely that it was still in the Squid cache, and it would be loaded from there, instead of going to the origin server.

Yes, it was a pain whenever the origin server had misconfigured caching headers. The "force reload bypassing caches" shortcut (Shift-Control-R, or Shift-Click-Reload-Button) was always handy. The move to TLS everywhere, which killed these "transparent" (when they worked) caching proxies, made the web much more stable and predictable.

Seems like it would only work in a very benign network environment. The first thing 4chan would do is to write a "peer" that answers yes for every SHA it gets and then sends over porn instead. Hope all your network software re-verifies the hash for every file you get! There is also the massive privacy leak of asking for the SHA of a certain file only found on specific websites and then seeing who has it.

HTTP is just inherently server-client, decreasing load on servers by sharing between clients was not a design goal.

If you read some of the original documents about the web, you'll see that it was one of the ideas. It never made it further than being an idea though.

Although IPFS seems to want to implement something like that, and probably much easier to do in a content-addressable way (like IPFS). So content has a hash, and as long as you trust the source of the hash, you can download the content of a hash from anywhere, even your drunk and slightly annoying neighbor that you don't actually trust, because you can verify that you got the right bytes after all.

Bittorrent does it for transfers already, and it works alright, so why not for the web too?

Because that would effectively broadcast your browsing history to the LAN.
That doesn't work with dynamic pages. A simple timestamp change would invalidate the hash between HEAD and GET.
At LAN parties we used to share our SteamApps folders so that others could copy games across. Interestingly (perhaps due to Windows networking handling copy-many-small-files poorly?) it was often faster to make an uncompressed ZIP of the files, copy that over the network, and unzip it on the other side.

Great to see that the steam client now does all this transparently.

Perfect! I have relatively slow internet and multiple PCs that I install games too. Way easier than making backup files and copying to USB.
Oh YES. For a family of pc gamers, this is a huge improvement!
In the meanwhile Steam's "backup and restore games" option doesn't really work, games are redownloaded anyways. The only way around is copying from steamapps both the game's folder and its appmanifest file.
You could do it unofficially forever just copy the steam apps folder from one PC to another or back it up and manually restore it.

The client would pick those up as valid installs as long as the signed in account has those games in their account.

I am more and more inclined to purchase things that I can hold in my hand or have it in the room with me and does not require internet connection to function.
I think we need to pause and just appreciate that Steam are building this in. Perhaps they've had it for a while in other forms, but bringing it to the Steam platform is excellent.

In a world where it seems like we're constantly downloading more and more, its refreshing to see a company try to curb that.

I don't have a use for it myself, but I think its great.

Long ago I had setup lancache for this purpose, which is strictly inferior. Not only can chunks be evicted from cache, but it seemed like there were a lot of cache misses even when testing re-downloading the same game.

Though lancache does still have one plus over this method: when I boot from Linux to Windows there's still a chance I might not have to re-download chunks.

A few friends used to run https://lancache.net/ to cache the traffic between the steam cliemt and their cdn. Its nice this feature is made accessible to all but there still remains cases where lan cache maybe preferable.
I thought you could always do this?
Very magnanimous.
But in 90s we could just copy one game to all computers and play offline...
I wonder if the image in the tweet was made by an AI?
LAN parties when?
steam deck is really making a lot of improvements on the whole pc gaming environment
funny thing is I could always do this with cracked games... and much more
did that stop working at some point?
So this feature seems to be target to family sharing PCs? I really hate Steam's family sharing. It seemed a great idea. I could purchase some games for kids on my account and they could play on their separate PC. I fully expected that I can't run same game on two PCs if I purchased just a single license. What I totally didn't expect was that if kid is playing any single game from my library, I can't play anything else on my PC! Two entirely different games, with two full paid licenses can't be played at the same time.

This policy moved Steam from "oh it's so convenient" to "ugh, I won't purchase anything ever again on the Steam". Yes, I could create a new account but then I'm locked out form all the games I already purchased.

Now if I'm buying a game the first thing I'm looking is if there's is a non-Steam version.

Wait, they stopped me before? I've always backed up my Steam library to my NAS just so I don't have to download 1+ TB if my Windows box decides to explode and take the drive and/or filesystem with it.
Jeeze, what took them so long?