Where are Steam games installed?

I want to buy a new notebook in the near future to play games on it. I'm looking forward for the new Steam for Linux client. My question is that where does the Steam install the games, on the home partition, or in the usr folder, or somewhere else? I do not use pre-release (i.e. beta) versions of either Steam or Ubuntu.

10 Answers

In newer versions of Steam, games seem to be located at:

~/.steam/steam/SteamApps/common

Don't know when this changed, but Steam is no longer in ~/.local/share

4

The default install location appears to be ~/.local/share/Steam. This is where Valve games are installed by default, which can't be changed using the Steam Libraries system.

The setup of this directory mirrors how Windows Steam is laid out, with the SteamApps folder containing both the .gcf files shared across Steam accounts and the individual steam account directories.

4

~/Steam is only for log files Downloaded data (client updates, etc) seam to go to ~/.steam instead.

If you don't want to pollute your $HOME, you can create a folder somewhere on a partition, give it your own user accounts's ownership and access rights and create some symlinks.

I personally did before launching the Steam Client second time:

sudo mkdir /opt/SteamFiles
sudo chown myuser:mygroup /opt/SteamFiles
cd ~
ln -s /opt/SteamFiles .steam

After installing and updating the client, all game and Steam client data ended up under /opt/SteamFiles and installing games directly pointed me to my created file system.

This can easily shared between multiple Linux installations on the same PC.

It install in this path:

/home/${USER}/Steam

Where ${USER} is the name of your ubuntu user.

1

As other users have already said, Steam is installed under ~/.local/share/Steam (where the ~/ means /home/<username>). The games themselves are installed in ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common.

However, when I attempted to find this directory in Wine, for some reason Wine wouldn't show any folder names starting with a ".", so it couldn't find the .local folder in order to get to the Steam directory. I was able to resolve this by going up in the directory tree to My Computer and then drilling down into the correct drive letter for your Ubuntu file system, which for me was Z:. Note that C: is an internally used drive letter in Wine for compatibility with Windows applications and won't show your Ubuntu files. From there you have to find your /home directory and follow the folders down to your Steam directory, i.e. Z:/home/<username>/.local/share/Steam.

1

It actually depends how you Installed Steam. (at least on 16.04LTS)

Via the steam.deb on steampowered.com the location ist ~/.local/share/Steam

Via ubuntu's own multiverse repository the location is ~/.steam

The second install method is the recommended one.

Mine are in ./.steam/steam/steamapps/common

If you installed the flatpack version you may find it here:

~/.var/app/

In my case I had a different place.

~/.steam/steam
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/steam
/usr/share/doc/steam
/usr/games/steam

The best way to know (at least for me) is to go to the root and find for Steam or steam.

cd /
sudo find -name steam

The directories on Linux is separated by user.

Assuming the user name is John the user folder will be '/home/john/' and Steam directory will be:

/home/john/.steam/steam/ # absolute path , i.e., full path
#or
$HOME/.steam/steam/ # using environment variable
#or
~/.steam/steam/

All above is the same

The character tilde ~ is the same of $HOME, both represent the 'home' directory.

1

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