Same game doubly shared on Steam

Question

I have activated the steam library sharing with a couple of friends, and all works well, except for one game.

The game in question is "Life is strange", though I do not believe the problem is specific to this game, but might happen with any game sold in episode with the first one being free.

In fact, friend "A" has only the first free episode of this game, while friend "B" has the full game with all extra content; however, when I try to start the game from the sharing, I "see" in my library only the copy from "A", and therefore I only can play the first episode.

I there a way to use the game shared from "B" instead?

Answer 1

This is a limitation of Steam Family Sharing caused by how it handles the data, specifically the fact it apparently only checks the first user in the sharing list when playing a shared game.

The program SFS-Select provides some functionality to help with this, and manual directions I'll share a part of below (mostly a copy/paste from a Reddit comment of mine):

Open /Steam/config/config.vdf in a text editor. Preferably something other than Notepad unless you change the settings to handle Tab as a tab character and not spaces (if that's not the default, and is a setting? It's been a long time since I used Notepad). Personally I like Atom as I know it can fold the data, but other programmer's editors likely can do so too.

Find the key/title "AuthorizedDevice" and backup and then remove the contents, which will look something like the following if it's only the one person; otherwise you'll have to find out which user is which using something like SteamIDFinder or SteamDB's calculator so you can just remove that one.

"AuthorizedDevice"

{

    "107311984"

    {

        "timeused"      "1532591757"

        "description"       "Machine-Name"

        "tokenid"       "#"

    }

}

When editing be careful of the curly braces ({, }) because if one is removed it will corrupt the file. And also the 2 tab characters between each "key" "value" pair -- Steam can consider the file corrupt even for this, but does not always do so.