How to Uninstall Steam Games

Gaming

Updated October 04, 2019

Uninstalling Steam games is really easy and is the quickest way to free up some extra hard drive space on your computer. With the number of awesome games you can get on Steam, it's no wonder that you've collected so many.

Fortunately, deleting Steam games doesn't have to mean that you'll lose them forever. Since it's a cloud-based service, uninstalling a game doesn't actually delete it from your account.

The Steam games you purchase (or have been gifted) remain attached to your account for life, so you can choose which ones to install on your device at any time even after deleting the games from your computer.

You can also move Steam games to another drive to free up disk space.

How to Delete Steam Games

If you’re looking to free up storage space, here’s how to uninstall Steam games you don’t play:

Open the Steam program and sign in to your account if asked to. Steam should be accessible through a shortcut on your desktop or wherever else your apps are kept, but if not, do a search for it with a file search tool.

If you have trouble signing in, you can recover your Steam name or password by selecting I CAN’T SIGN IN.
Select LIBRARY at the top, and then GAMES.
Right-click the game you want uninstalled, and choose Uninstall.

Before uninstalling a Steam game, you should ensure that any progress has been backed up. 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 game data here (copy the data somewhere safe): C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata, C:\Users\[username]\Documents\My Games, or C:\Users\[username]\Saved Games.
Select DELETE 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.