This past week has been a wild one for Valve/Steam news, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. Thursday evening, prominent SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik Tweeted about something he found in Steam’s code. This discovery seems to be an upcoming “peer content” client/server mode.
Pavel is one of many to have interpreted this new code this way. Within minutes, other programmers had started confirming his findings and echoed that Valve appeared to be busy working on peer-to-peer Steam downloads on LAN.
Valve is seemingly working on peer-to-peer Steam downloads on LAN. pic.twitter.com/o6fXYo7gHK
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) October 27, 2022
So what does it mean for the average Steam user? If implemented, this feature would allow Steam users to transfer gaming libraries over their local network without re-downloading them. While this isn’t going to excite gamers who are rolling around with high-speed, uncapped fibre lines, it is excellent for those without.
This is also not some abandoned feature of Steam that was only discovered now. The code was only added after the latest Steam beta client meaning this is more than likely something that Valve is actively working on. Steam has seen many features start rolling out over the last few weeks, with a full revamp of the decade-old Big Picture mode being the latest.
Users who are interested in following along with Valve as they update and tweak the Steam interface can access the Steam Client beta by heading to the settings menu in Steam, clicking on the Account tab, and then checking the “opt into the beta” option. Steam will then require you to restart the program, after which you will be able to interact with the beta client and preview changes before they become available to general users.