When someone talks about buying computer games, most people think of applications like Steam, Valve’s game store, which had a monopoly on game distribution until other brands likeEpic Gamesand the developers themselves. video games got into the garlic.
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Steam has been around personal computers since 2003, offering games and as the years went by many more features and additional products, such as controls, and other services to complement video games such as Steam Workshop to distribute content created by the community for games, or Remote Play to play remotely and now coming to develop his own console, the Steam Deck.
Thus, having been on the market for so many years, the Steam platform has a wide variety of users, numbered in millions throughout the world, and games, with more than 50,000 titles in 2021, possibly many more today,
Thus, it is to be expected that the platform will have basic functionalities such as cloud storage or the option to manage installed games properly.
And in fact, it has them, although in the case of managing installed games, it will not always be the easiest, since they are managed differently from other platforms, which we will explain in this guide in order to easily locate the games that we already have installed. and step by step.
How to locate the games on Steam step by step?
The first thing we have to understand about the games on Steam is that they are not grouped individually, but rather they are installed in Steam game libraries.
The Steam library is nothing more than a folder that Steam creates where it saves the games, it does not have proprietary file formats or is protected against modification.
So we can access them and see their content and that of the installed games as we would with any other game, the only thing that changes the process is that when importing games we will not do it individually for each game, but what we will import will be the Steam libraries, which in turn will import all the games that are in them.
So, in order to recognize games that we already have on Steam we will have to follow the following steps:
- Open Steam and log in. We will have to do this with an account that has the games we are importing installed.
- Go to Settings. Clicking on the Steam text at the top left of the window and there clicking on the parameter option.
- Go to the Downloads tab. And there click on the Steam library folders option.
- Click on the “+” button. To open the import dropdown.
- In the dropdown choose the option to let me choose a location.
- Locate and add the folder where the Steam library is. Using for this the file explorer window that will open when pressing the previous option.
Once this is done, the application should recognize the games and allow us to play or update them to bring them up to date and then be able to open them, but we must bear in mind that sometimes this method will not work and we will have to reinstall them.
It may also be that if we only have a Steam library when we start downloading the game that we already have downloaded, it will automatically recognize it if we are downloading it to the same location where it is.
It must also be considered that there are times when we will not be able to incorporate a Steam library if it is in another Steam installation on another hard drive since by default the Steam library is created within the program installation and can cause problems to detect it.
In that case, it is recommended to use the Steam installation from that hard drive instead of installing it again.