PSA - Steam updating shared .NET, Visual C++ and PhysX libraries (updates for many installed games)

Yeah, 1,800-ish games installed, estimating 500-600 updates, maybe more, it's hard to tell.

Good to know, I have around 600 games installed and had 137 0 bytes updates just now, though it happened before that I had a lot of 0 bytes updates but always nice to know why ^^

I asked for that for years and people treated me like crazy. Good to know years later that thing is Ok thing.

Is not the 1st time that something like this happen on Steam (it happen one or two times in 2018). I dont know for the rest, but in my case the update was for 362.6 Mb, and was "shared" for all the games in the queue, i mean, after the 1st game in the queue finish to download those 362.6Mb, the rest download very small "updates" about 0Mb each. Also i noticed if i pause the 1st game on the list and start to update the next on the queu, the download progress was the same, i.e. the 1st game in the list was Pillars of Eternity 2, but when i move to the 1st place Killing Floor 2 it resume the download from the 99.4 Mb/362.6Mb from the PoE2 progress, instead of start from 0Mb/362.4Mb. After finished the "update" of KF2, the rest of the games seems to download nothing and the whole process end quickly for all my games (~70 games in queue). I check the redist/commonredist folders of those games i did not noticed any changes in the time stamp of the files, or in the size (about 120-160Mb). So i still not sure what was downloaded.

Thanks for creating a thread explaining this! Just updated 27 games which is around half of what I have installed.

Got about 12-13GB of my HDD space back, thanks to this.
Time to install some more desktop icons ... err, I mean games ... and wish there were more hours in a day.

Literally got 4GBs back.

i'll just leave it here

Hey thanks. I was curious why I had about 130 0MB updates yesterday. I didn’t pay attention to how much space was used/ saved but I’m all for cleaning up redundancy. I guess this means that steam cleaner apps won’t be as useful now.

Thanks for the info. Was wondering where all these damn 0 byte updates were coming from. :D

Well, that should reduce the need to run TikiOne Steam Cleaner on a regular basis.

I noticed the common redist folder, in the Steam client directory tree, recently while building a new system. I had long wondered why they hadn't done this before, instead of having each game have to include it in their download, and duplicate it over and over. I guess it took them a bit to set the back end to pull the string, as 2 days ago I had 395 games all list updates available (I have 900 installed on a 4TB dedicated to games).

It's nice they've done this, as it seems the right way to do things, but I suspect it was motivated by their Steamplay support in Linux. Linux users can enable Steamplay in the client, and install/play games that are only available for Windows. Many people running this have been complaining about constant updates pending for certain games, every time they launch Steam. I suspect it may have had something to do with these Windows redist files that was causing the constant pending updates on Linux clients, so they've centralized it as a solution.