How to Uninstall Steam Games and Free Up Space in 2026

The short version: uninstalling a Steam game through the Steam client is the fastest way to get gigabytes back, but the client leaves leftover folders, shader caches and workshop files behind more often than people realise. Do it (right game, right drive, right cleanup afterwards) and you can free up 100GB or more from a single big title. Do it lazily and you'll be back here in three months wondering why your drive is full again.

Why Steam games have gotten this big

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III sits around 190 to 220GB once you install all the texture packs. Call of Duty: Warzone alone can eat 100GB on its own. Cyberpunk 2077 is roughly 70GB. Red Dead Redemption 2 is around 150GB. GTA V, an eleven year old game, still asks for close to 100GB. None of that is a mistake by the developers, it's 4K texture packs, uncompressed audio in a dozen languages, and multiplayer maps you'll never load. Ten years ago a full Steam library of forty games fit on a 500GB drive. Today five of those games alone would fill it.

That's the actual problem behind "why is my PC full", and it's why uninstalling games has become a monthly chore rather than a once-a-year clean up for a lot of PC gamers.

How to delete Steam games to free up space, step by step

The clean way, every time:

• Open Steam, go to your Library
• Right click the game you want to remove
• Choose Manage, then Uninstall
• Confirm in the pop-up, and let it finish before closing Steam

You can also do it from Windows directly: Settings, then Apps, then Installed Apps, find the game, click the three dots, and choose Uninstall. Both routes remove the game files themselves, but neither one is as thorough as most guides claim.

Before you uninstall anything, check Steam's own storage breakdown. Go to Steam, Settings, Storage. It lists every drive Steam has games on and shows exactly how much each installed game takes up right now, sorted largest first. This is the single most useful screen for this whole job because it tells you instantly which two or three games are responsible for most of your missing space, rather than guessing.

A worked example: clearing space on a nearly full laptop

Say you're running a mid-range gaming laptop with a 512GB SSD, and Windows keeps warning you that your C drive has less than 10GB free. You open Steam's storage tab and see forty-three installed games, but two of them, an old Call of Duty title and Red Dead Redemption 2, take up 320GB between them. You haven't opened either in four months.

You uninstall both through the Steam client. That alone should give you back roughly 300GB. But when you check File Explorer afterwards, the game folders inside steamapps/common aren't fully gone, there's still a leftover folder for Red Dead Redemption 2 holding about 4GB of mod files and cached textures that Steam's uninstaller didn't touch because they weren't tracked in its manifest. You delete that folder manually. You also check steamapps/workshop/content, where old Call of Duty operator packs and custom maps had quietly stacked up another 6GB nobody remembers subscribing to. Total reclaimed: just under 330GB, from a machine that was completely full an hour earlier.

That's the realistic version of "uninstall a game, get space back." The Steam client does the bulk of the work, but the last 3 to 5 percent is manual, and almost nobody mentions that part.

What uninstalling doesn't delete

This is the bit most guides skip over, and it matters. When you uninstall a game through Steam, it removes the core install files and updates the registry, but it commonly leaves behind:

• The empty (or near-empty) game folder inside steamapps/common
• Shader cache files under steamapps/shadercache, which can be several GB per game on titles with ray tracing
• Workshop content and mods, stored separately and not always cleared automatically
• Local save files and configs, kept deliberately in case you reinstall, but rarely mentioned to you
• Partial or interrupted downloads sitting in steamapps/downloading, which can silently hold tens of gigabytes if an update failed midway and Steam never cleaned up after itself

Go and check that downloading folder now. On a lot of PCs that haven't been looked at in a while, it's holding several GB of dead weight from an update that never completed.

The uncomfortable bit nobody wants to say out loud

Uninstalling games is not a storage strategy, it's damage control. If your drive fills up every few months, the actual fix isn't a better cleaning routine, it's more storage or fewer massive games installed at once, and no amount of tidying steamapps folders changes that maths. A 1TB external SSD costs somewhere between £60 and £100 in the UK right now and solves the problem for years. Repeating this uninstall-and-reclaim cycle every quarter, on a drive that's fundamentally too small for modern game sizes, is a habit, not a solution.

There's a second uncomfortable truth here too. If you uninstall a 150GB game today because you're bored of it, and want it back in six months, you're not getting it back for free. At an average UK broadband speed of around 70 to 100Mbps, redownloading a 150GB title realistically takes two to four hours, sometimes longer during peak evening hours when your provider's network is busiest. Uninstalling feels instant. Getting the game back never is.

Other places space hides on a gaming PC

Steam games are usually the biggest single culprits, but they're rarely the only ones. Check these too once you've dealt with your library:

• Windows.old folder after an OS update, which can hold 20 to 30GB and is safe to delete via Disk Cleanup once you're sure the update installed correctly
• Your Downloads folder, which on most PCs I've seen described by readers holds years of installers, ISOs and duplicate zip files nobody's opened since
• Epic Games and other launchers running their own separate library, often forgotten entirely when someone only audits Steam
• Recycle Bin, which doesn't free anything until you empty it

If you're rebuilding a library from scratch on a low-storage laptop, it's worth being fussier from the start about what you install. If storage is tight, this piece on how to choose free PC games that won't slow down your computer is a useful filter before you download anything new, rather than uninstalling it again in a month.

What to reinstall instead of the space-hungry giants

Once you've cleared out the 100GB-plus titles you're not playing, it's worth being deliberate about what goes back on the drive. A lot of good games run in under 10GB. If you're setting a laptop up for offline play, I'd point you toward a rundown of free offline game downloads for Windows 10 laptops that lists what's worth keeping installed long-term rather than filling the same drive again with another oversized shooter.

If the machine in question is old or low-spec rather than just short on storage, the calculation changes again, and it's worth looking at what runs on a low-end PC or old laptop in 2026 before you reinstall anything that made the fans scream last time. Strategy fans in particular tend to assume their favourite titles are heavy, when a lot of the best free offline strategy games for PC are under 5GB and run comfortably on hardware that would choke on a modern shooter's texture pack.

And if you're simply starting fresh after a clear-out and want a shortlist rather than trawling Steam's store page for an hour, there's a broader list of the best free PC games worth downloading today that's worth checking before you commit fresh gigabytes to anything.

A quick monthly habit that prevents this

Rather than waiting until your drive is at 2GB free and Windows starts throwing warnings, set a recurring reminder, once a month is plenty, to open Steam's Storage settings and glance at what's sitting there. It takes about ninety seconds. Anything you haven't launched in eight weeks is a candidate for uninstalling. This single habit does more for a gaming PC's long-term health than any one-off deep clean, because it stops the backlog from building up in the first place.

I keep every related walkthrough in the Free Games to Play Offline and Online: Every Guide in One Place (2026).

Related: writing for us on developers.

Related: the gaming page.

Frequently asked questions

Does uninstalling a Steam game delete my save files?

Not always, and that's by design. Steam keeps local save data and Steam Cloud saves separately from the install files, so reinstalling the same game usually restores your progress. Always confirm Steam Cloud is switched on for that title in Settings, Cloud, before you uninstall, otherwise a save stored only on that PC can be lost.

Why does my drive still look full after uninstalling several games?

Leftover shader cache, workshop content and unfinished downloads in the steamapps folder are the usual culprits. Check steamapps/shadercache, steamapps/workshop and steamapps/downloading manually after an uninstall, since Steam doesn't always clear all three automatically.

Can I move Steam games to a different drive instead of deleting them?

Yes. In Steam, go to Settings, Storage, add the new drive as a Steam Library Folder, then right click the installed game in your Library, choose Properties, Local Files, and Move Install Folder. This frees your main drive without losing the install or your saves.

How much space does a typical AAA Steam game take up in 2026?

Most modern blockbuster titles now sit between 70GB and 200GB once fully patched, with online shooters and open-world games at the higher end. That's roughly four to ten times the size of a typical game from a decade ago.