How do I get Steam/Uplay to recognize and support games that I have moved to the PC via my home network?

[nathdman]

I recently got a new PC and would like to move the games over to it from my old PC using my homegroup. I know how to transfer them, but am concerned that certain games would be unsupported on their respective engines if I do not download them through said engine. More specifically, I am trying to figure out if it is possible to get Uplay to support Assassins Creed 4. I would like for Uplay to recognize the game and provide updates when they are available. I also hope to do the same thing with a few steam games. Does anybody have any experience/advice for this? Thanks ahead of time

 

[houldendub]

Steam games are as simply as copy and pasting into the steamapps folder, once they're there, all you have to do is restart Steam, go through the install process and it should simply say "detecting files".

Uplay might be a different kettle of fish though, so it's probably worth doing a straight up reinstall of the games, should copying them fail.

 

[nathdman]

The steam solution seems easy enough. Thanks for that. The biggest reason I was hoping to get this to work with Uplay is because my internet is not the fastest. It would take quite a while to download Assassins Creed again.

 

[houldendub]

Yeah I feel your pain, nothing sucks more than having to download everything again. I've seen a suggestion on the Uplay forums which might be helpful:

1) Copy your Uplay games to a seperate hard drive, or just move them wherever they're safe.
2) Uninstall Uplay on the drive you DO NOT want
3) Reinstall Uplay on your new hard drive
4) Start downloading a game for roughly 20MB (This ensures there's enough data installed and enough registry values created)
5) Pause the download and exit Uplay
6) Copy the game from your backup into your new Uplay folder, merge files if applicable (though if this doesn't work just straight up replace)
7) Restart Uplay, restart the download/install of the file

And (fingers crossed) voila, the games should just detect rather than fully install, though this isn't guaranteed as Uplay is a nightmare. Hope this works!

 

[alvareo]

Yeah I feel your pain, nothing sucks more than having to download everything again. I've seen a suggestion on the Uplay forums which might be helpful:

1) Copy your Uplay games to a seperate hard drive, or just move them wherever they're safe.
2) Uninstall Uplay on the drive you DO NOT want
3) Reinstall Uplay on your new hard drive
4) Start downloading a game for roughly 20MB (This ensures there's enough data installed and enough registry values created)
5) Pause the download and exit Uplay
6) Copy the game from your backup into your new Uplay folder, merge files if applicable (though if this doesn't work just straight up replace)
7) Restart Uplay, restart the download/install of the file

And (fingers crossed) voila, the games should just detect rather than fully install, though this isn't guaranteed as Uplay is a nightmare. Hope this works!

ugh, I guess they "fixed" this "bug" because now when I reopen it not only is the download not paused, but when I try to download it it gets stuck at zero.
Edit: It started downloading everything all over again. Thanks, Ubisoft!