Does uninstalling Steam also uninstall games installed through steam?

Question

If anyone caught me in chat, I'm currently having problems with Steam, which is keeping me not only from playing Portal 2, but also from accessing any of the other 28 steam game shortcuts on my desktop.

I'm considering just uninstalling and then reinstalling Steam, hoping that will knock loose whatever wheels got clogged in the first place, but, I'd rather look for alternative ways if uninstalling steam means redownloading all of those games.

So, do Steam-installed games stay installed on your hard drive when steam itself is removed?

Answer 1

Move the subfolder /steamapps/ in a safe place before uninstalling Steam, then do the following steps:

1. Uninstall Steam
2. Reinstall Steam
3. Launch Steam
4. Exit Steam
5. Move the content of your /steamapps/ backup to the new /steamapps/ subfolder
6. Relaunch Steam

At this point Steam should find all games without any other action; in the worst case, where Steam does not detect some games as installed, just reinstall them and the game will be downloaded and ready in few seconds/minutes because it only need to validate the game content cache.

Answer 2

You can also create a backup of your Steam Games. You can use it to backup your saves to CD, DVD or an external hard drive. You also have the option of backing up individual games or all of your Steam games. If you backup multiple games at once, you are given the option to choose which games you'd like to restore when you initiate the restore procedure. I used this when upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7.

See Steam Support:Using the Steam Backup Feature

Answer 3

Before drilling a giant hole through the mountain, you can check if there are pathways around it.

Have you tried deleting everything except your steam.exe and steamapps in the same directory and re-running steam.exe?

Answer 4

Nothing in the actual Steam program folder is guaranteed safe; but you can keep your games in other directories too. Look under the Steam --> Settings menu, and find the "Downloads" tab. You'll have an option at the top for Steam library folders.

Click it.

Then, click "Add Library Folder" and add a new folder to act as a steamapps folder. After that, you can right-click on each installed game, go to properties, and then local files, and transfer everything to your new directory with "Move Install Folder", through a drop down of registered locations.

Once all of your games are moved outside of the default steamapps directory, it's safe to purge and reinstall. After that, just go to "Add Library Folder" again and add the same directory as before, and all of your games will be back.

Generally, I recommend doing this by default—you never know when a hard drive is going to fail, or Steam will get a kink in its coding, or your old disk will run out of space, or your OS will completely fail... better to not have to install everything over again.