Moving Steam games to a different folder or hard drive is finally easy
Valve’s added quite a few quality-of-life improvements to Steam in the past few years, including the ability to install multiple games at the same time, tagging games you already own in the store so you don’t try to buy them again, and adding controller support to every game.
But last week’s update will be particularly welcome news to anyone with multiple hard drives: You can now move a game’s install folder to a different Steam Library folder from within Steam itself.
Prior to now, you had one of two options: Either uninstall the game and reinstall it on a new drive or (smarter) move the game’s install folder manually by drag-and-dropping it into a different Steam Library folder.
The problem is Steam didn’t like this latter option much. After moving an install, Steam needed to re-verify all of the game’s files one at a time to make sure nothing got screwed up. And Steam wouldn’t even register a game's presence if you moved it over from an external drive, instead continuing to show you an “Install” button in the client until after it’d gone through this verification process.
Things are simpler now though. Right-click on a game, select Properties, then Local Files, and at the bottom you’ll see a button tagged “Move Install Folder.” Click it and you’ll be presented with a list of all your available Steam library locations. Easy.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to batch-move a bunch of games yet, so those looking to migrate an entire hard drive’s worth of games are probably better off using the ol’ drag-and-drop method for the time being. Hopefully that functionality is on the way. Still, Steam's newfound feature a good start—especially for those with limited SSD space who are constantly moving installs around.
