Delete Steam games for more storage space
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:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/tim-fisher-5820c8345f9b581c0b5a63cf.jpg "Save Hard Drive Space by Deleting Steam Games (1)")
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
- Emporia State University
Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the SVP and General Manager of Lifewire.
Updated on March 7, 2023
In This Article
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In This Article
- Deleting Steam Games
- Backing Up Steam Games
- Why Delete Steam Games?
What to Know
- Open Steam and go to Library > Games. Locate the game you want to delete.
- Right-click the game and select Manage > Uninstall > Uninstall to delete it from your computer.
- Don't forget to check if the game is backed up in case you want to reinstall it later.
This article explains how to uninstall Steam games from your computer. It includes information on ensuring your data is backed up before deleting the game.
How to Delete Steam Games
You can uninstall Steam games in just a few steps:
Open Steam and select LIBRARY at the top.
If you have trouble signing in, you can recover your Steam name or password.
Right-click the game you want uninstalled, and choose Manage > Uninstall.
If you need to, make sure any progress has been backed up. There's more on this below.
If you don't see your list of games, choose GAMES from the menu.
Select Uninstall on the prompt.
Depending on the size of the game, you might see a progress window as it gets deleted. When the game uninstall is complete, the window you see above will disappear and the title will be removed from your list of Steam games.
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Backing Up Steam Games
Depending on the game, it may or may not be automatically saved to your Steam account so that it can be restored if/when you reinstall the game.
Titles that don't save progress online store data in one of these folders, which you can copy elsewhere:
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata
- C:\Users\[username]\Documents\My Games
- C:\Users\[username]\Saved Games
Do You Need to Uninstall Steam Games?
Uninstalling Steam games frees up space on your computer's hard drive. With the platform's huge catalog, such as these awesome free Steam games, it's no wonder you've collected so many.
Deleting games doesn't mean that you lose them forever, however, since Steam is a cloud-based service. This means uninstalling a game doesn't delete it from your account. You can reinstall games on your devices at any time, even after deleting them from your computer.
You can instead move Steam games to another drive if your reason behind deleting the game is to free up disk space.
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