Steam has a habit of irking us in unexpected ways. OK, Steam is a great client that has completely transformed PC Gaming, but there are always little niggling issues here and there that hamper the near-perfect experience.
One of those issues for many gamers, including myself, has always been the Install location of games. Steam chooses one location, and sticks to that. You cannot change that. So if your Steam partition is full and you want to install a new game, you’re stuck. Personally, and I’m sure many of you are in a similar situation, my boot partition is a 120GB SSD, which isn’t enough for holding all you applications and games. And this partition is always on the borderline of being full. I had no option but to remove a game which I still play on Steam, to install a new one, even though I have another 1 TB partition which is 80% free. Steam doesn’t ask you your install location, but selects the default one.
I remember I had Arkham City installed which takes a good 10 gigs of hard drive space, and then came along Hitman: Absolution, which required 8 GB. With on 3 GB free on my SSD, I had no option but to uninstall Arkham City, which I still wanted to play. So I removed it, and went on and installed Hitman. Just a week later, come Far Cry 3 and I am in the same dilemma.
This is not the case now, as Steam has finally introduced the feature to select your own installation folder. Using this feature previously required you to opt for Beta participation, not anymore, as feature is now present in Steam’s stable versions. You cannot use it straight up, you’ll have to set it up. This is how:
Right Click on the Steam shortcut you use, and click ‘Properties’
You should see a Window open up. In the Target box, add “-dev” at the end of the command line. It should look something like this.
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe” -dev
Click OK, and fire up Steam. In your Steam window, you will now see a CONSOLE button, as illustrated below. Click it.
You will now an MSDOS-like interface. This is the Steam Console. Below, you will have to type the following command, and hit Enter:
install_folder_ui
A windows will pop up, you have to click Add Install Folder, at the bottom left corner of the window.
Now, select a path, any path, you want to add in the Steam library, and voila, you’re no longer limited to just one location. And congratulations on using the Steam console for the first time!
Although a very useful feature, we hope Steam would simplify this with future updates, but till then, you’re still good to go, if you’re willing to put in the effort.
Stay iLL!
