Today’s games are unapologetically massive. In the old days, game sizes were limited by their respective medium. With the advent of broadband internet and digital downloads, though, games have transcended physical mediums and grown exponentially in size, being limited only by hard drive space and bandwidth.

That is to say, there are plenty of reasons why users may need to shuffle their games between drives. Whether you need to allocate space on your C drive for the newest game or you’ve picked up a new external drive, there are a couple of ways to move installed games around in Steam, the world’s foremost digital PC gaming platform.

We’re going to tell you how to move one game, or relocate an entire Steam library, to another drive without any stress. 

Create a New Steam Library

To create a new steam library, you’ll first need to set up a new directory for your Steam games, which is a straightforward process.

Step 1: If you haven’t already, install Steam. Next, open Steam. With the Steam client open, click “Steam” in the utmost left corner. Then, choose “settings” from the dropdown menu. That will launch a separate window.

Moving Games to a New Library

Now that we’ve created a secondary library for games, you will want to move the game files to the new location.

Step 1: Right-click an installed game and select “properties.”

Moving a Library

We just covered moving Steam games individually, but maybe you want to move an entire library to a new drive. It’s quite easy to amass a swelling collection of installed games, especially if you fancy the unrepentant glut of Steam sales. Hey, it happens to the best of us. Whatever the case, moving Steam libraries is simple.

Before starting, we recommend making a backup of the Steam library folder you’re moving, in case things run afoul. You can create a copy to keep locally or use Steam’s backup feature.

Step 1: Create a Steam library folder following the instructions above, then close the Steam client.

Step 2: Browse to the Steam installation folder to be moved. Once there, delete all files and folders except for “Steamapps” and “userdata.”

Steam and the Cloud

The Steam Cloud is great, and it makes us wonder how we survived the primitive age of gaming when cloud saves didn’t exist and save-files were limited to one machine or memory card.

Many people familiar with Steam likely know about Steam Cloud. It is cloud storage hosted by Steam that allows users to enable cloud saves, backup and restore games, store Steam user settings and the like. That said, not all Steam games support the feature, most notably older titles.

Final Thoughts

Those of you who have been using Steam since before 2017 probably remember the tedium of moving games between drives, and using symbolic links. Thankfully, moving Steam games and library folders is much easier these days, and hopefully we’ve demonstrated that.

When it comes to moving games in batches or moving library folders, Steam could be improved. Although, compared to rivals such as Origin and GOG Galaxy, there’s little to complain about.