Steam Deck now supports game transfers on the local network, allowing users to copy installed games from their PCs to Steam Deck without having to re-download them over the Internet, one of the features of the Steam Deck beta update released last week that both reduces network traffic usage and speeds up installation or updates.
To get this feature, users first have to enable the beta version of Steam on Steam Deck and Steam Client on their PC, after which they select the game they want to install on Steam Deck and Steam will automatically check if there are any computers on the user’s network that already own the game. If one is found, Steam will start the game transfer process.
Notably, this feature also applies to computers on the same network, so users can freely transfer installed Steam games from any other computer in the user’s home to the user’s computer. steam details how this feature works on its support page, noting that if the device’s connection drops during transfer or if there is no more content to transfer, steam will instead use its own public content server to download the remaining content.
Users can also adjust settings to determine which PCs Steam Deck (or PC) can download from. While Steam has it set to “My own devices only by default,” which means users can only transfer games from the user’s device that is logged into Steam, users can also set it to “My friends only” and “Any user” if they want to get the game from a friend or family member’s PC. ” and “Any user”.
