Transferring between Steam accounts

paintguy · 29 Dec 2018 at 14:17

Hi all, I'm not much of a gamer myself so could do with some help please.

My son is 13 today so eligible for a Steam account of his own. He has a couple of games on my Steam account that we'd like to transfer over once his is set up. I'm aware that I can't actually transfer the games and he'd have to purchase new copies on his account but it would be great if he could keep his progress by moving over any saves / data / files etc.

Games involved are Terraria, Scrap Mechanic & Team Fortress 2

I'd thought about just backing up on my account and restoring to his, but not sure if there's more to it than that.

Thanks in advance.

TNA · 29 Dec 2018 at 14:19

To my knowledge this is not possible. Might be worth contacting steam support however?

Bounce · 29 Dec 2018 at 14:26

paintguy said:
Hi all, I'm not much of a gamer myself so could do with some help please.

My son is 13 today so eligible for a Steam account of his own. He has a couple of games on my Steam account that we'd like to transfer over once his is set up. I'm aware that I can't actually transfer the games and he'd have to purchase new copies on his account but it would be great if he could keep his progress by moving over any saves / data / files etc.

Games involved are Terraria, Scrap Mechanic & Team Fortress 2

I'd thought about just backing up on my account and restoring to his, but not sure if there's more to it than that.

Thanks in advance.

Gift your son your steam account.

Simples

Thekwango · 29 Dec 2018 at 14:44

Would Family share or whatever it’s called work? You allow him access to play the games in your account while he is signed in to his own.

Megahurtz400 · 29 Dec 2018 at 15:10

Thekwango said:
Would Family share or whatever it’s called work? You allow him access to play the games in your account while he is signed in to his own.

This may work, I’m not sure how to set it up but I borrowed my dads laptop when working away once and logged into my steam account and all of his games were on there.

You can’t play the same game on both accounts at the same time, but do some googling to see if it suits

paintguy · 29 Dec 2018 at 15:17

Thanks all.

I didn't really want to go the official support route in case they had an issue with the age rating of TF2 for example, but will have a look at the family share.

Loki · 29 Dec 2018 at 19:27

Family share works well and is relatively painless to set up

MrWhippy · 29 Dec 2018 at 22:42

Unless you want to play at the same time. You share "access to the library" so if you fire up any steam game, he'll get booted out of whatever shared game he's playing.

edGfaCTor · 30 Dec 2018 at 08:41

Family share is the only solution in this case but it doesn't share things like save games they will be locked to your profile only.

bayo000 · 30 Dec 2018 at 09:13

If you want to play a single player game one of you can go to offline mode which should let the other one play as well.

Dirk Diggler · 30 Dec 2018 at 09:35

paintguy said:
but it would be great if he could keep his progress by moving over any saves / data / files etc.

I'm not sure why nobody has picked up on this; if all you want to do is transfer his settings and saves to his own purchased games then that's really easy, just copy the relevant files to his PC.

Spacedeck · 30 Dec 2018 at 11:49

String said:
I'm not sure why nobody has picked up on this; if all you want to do is transfer his settings and saves to his own purchased games then that's really easy, just copy the relevant files to his PC.

I thought all games are saved locally on the machine anyway. Should be pretty easy to just transfer the save file over. I'm not sure if this will be possible on TF2 though, since TF2 is an online game, so progress will be tied to that account.

Joop · 30 Dec 2018 at 12:34

Use game save manager to transfer his stuff over to his account or Game backup monitor.

Talasour · 31 Dec 2018 at 13:18

It may be best just enabling family sharing on your account and then just giving him access to the games he bought and then just transfering the save game file over to the second PC, it must be somewhere locally right?.

Raumarik · 31 Dec 2018 at 13:36

family sharing works great just use it tbh

Talasour · 31 Dec 2018 at 14:24

Raumarik said:
family sharing works great just use it tbh

Yeah, I mean it might be the best option in this situation rather than just buying the game(s) again and then having to start all over again.

Pretty sure the save files are kept on the cloud as well so not sure if that could also carry over with the family sharing.

paintguy · 4 Jan 2019 at 12:10

We seem to have success. Thanks for all the input guys.

For anyone searching this in the future: We set up family sharing which allowed him to install the games on his machine. He then copied the game files from my machine and overwrote the ones on his own.

We've only tried Terraria so far but he can now just continue on from where he left off on my account, with as all his progress intact.

Megahurtz400 · 4 Jan 2019 at 16:13

paintguy said:
We seem to have success. Thanks for all the input guys.

For anyone searching this in the future: We set up family sharing which allowed him to install the games on his machine. He then copied the game files from my machine and overwrote the ones on his own.

We've only tried Terraria so far but he can now just continue on from where he left off on my account, with as all his progress intact.

Glad you got it working!