Originally posted by not.skelly:

How to get back the Old Family Sharing.

Im sure everyone is mad about the new Family Sharing, since with the new one if you have a friend from another country, then you will not be able to share you games with them anymore. So heres a step by step tutorial on how to downgrade your Steam client which reverts the Family Sharing back to its old version.

1. You will need to close Steam

2. Go to where the Steam.exe is located, the default location is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam"
Create a shortcut for steam.exe and go to its properties

3. At target, press space at the end, and paste this text in:

-forcesteamupdate -forcepackagedownload -overridepackageurl http://web.archive.org/web/20240414011627if_/media.steampowered.com/client -exitsteam

The full text should look like this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam.exe" -forcesteamupdate -forcepackagedownload -overridepackageurl http://web.archive.org/web/20240414011627if_/media.steampowered.com/client -exitsteam

5. Click Apply and run the shortcut. Its gonna open the update menu, just wait for it to finish and it should close automatically.

6. Before you launch Steam normally, you will need to prevent it from updating, which you can do by creating a "Steam.cfg" file and the same place steam.exe is located at and paste the following text into the cfg file:

BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable

7. Save the cfg file and launch steam.exe (not the shortcut), once its loads in you should have the old Family Sharing option.


Keep in mind that this wont last forever, because at early 2025 Steam will get rid of the old Family Sharing completely.