Quote Originally Posted by slowtarget View Post
I've never seen Steam pull off a "smart" download of a real game based on the demo. It'd be possible and really cool if they did. Maybe they do for other games. For all the demo/full game pairs I've downloaded (3?), Steam made separate directories for the demo and full game and I don't remember seeing any download size decrease due to having the demo around.

Do other games do this? Can anyone give an example? It would give us an idea what types of games they can pull it off with.
I don't know how it handles the files, but I fairly certain Half Life 2 and episodes share a lot of files. The reason being that Steam seems to report different amount of space beening needed for downloads depending on what is installed.

Same goes for Counter-Strike. it is a much smaller download if you already have Half Life 2 installed, than if you download it directly.

I could have sworn the same went for Civ 4. I believe the BTS and Warlords installs rely heavily on Civ 4 base installs. I have all three in Steam, and had them all installed for a while, but I didn't save much space when I decided to remove Civ4 base and Warlords, as I only play BTS...

I can't give you any firm examples though. Take this as more of an unconfirmed feeling based on limited user experience, than a verified test...