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In Steam you can organise the games in your library by creating categories and adding the games to them:

Game categories link

However, there appears to be no option to rename these. How can I do this?

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    The "No." category gave me a chuckle :-) – Karl Nicoll Apr 19 '17 at 16:57
  • Your categories are similar to mine :) Except I have to break down each category even further since I have too many games. – 6005 Apr 20 '17 at 2:02
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    @6005 They aren't my categories I my have borrowed the image :P – TheLethalCarrot Apr 20 '17 at 7:56
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    I have nearly 600 games in my steam library and I'm too lazy to sort them all out straight away so I'm doing them a bit at a time. – TheLethalCarrot Apr 20 '17 at 14:13
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One way you can do this is to move all the games to a newly created category and delete the old one (A category is deleted when no games are inside of it). You can do this by:

  1. Select all the games in the category:
    • Control click on all the ones you want
    • Shift click the top and the bottom one
  2. Right click on the selected games
  3. From the list select "Set Categories..."
  4. In the new window create the new category
  5. Add the games to the new category and remove them from the old one

Another way to do this is to change the settings file. Before altering this file make sure to close and exit steam. The file is located where steam is installed, in my case it is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam

From this root it is located at:

root\userdata\<userid>\7\remote\sharedconfig.vdf

Where <userid> corresponds to the users library you want to update. Open this file in notepad, or better yet notepad++. You then need to find and replace all examples of the category surrounded by quotes.

For example, if I wanted to rename the category Want to play to Meh I'd find on "Want to play" and replace with "Meh".

Once you've made all the relevant changes to the file, save it and open steam again.

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  • This is true, there is no way to rename the category. Categories simply cease to exist once there are no more games in them, so creating a new one is really your only route. – Beninja2 Apr 19 '17 at 13:20
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    And nice..... Answering your own question like that. Its almost as if you had the answer the whole time.... – Beninja2 Apr 19 '17 at 13:21
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    @Beninja2 Side note: Self answering is actually encouraged to help spread information :) – TheLethalCarrot Apr 19 '17 at 14:31
  • Is multi-selecting games a new feature? I feel like I've tried that before with no success (but I could have been doing it wrong as well). – Brian J Apr 19 '17 at 15:25
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    @Beninja2: Not only is self-answering acceptable, it's actually encouraged. There's even an achievement for it! – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Apr 19 '17 at 15:41
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If like me you've got way too many Steam games to manage through their crap interface, Depressurizer is a pretty nifty tool to manage your Steam library.

It will let you rename categories albeit you asked how to do that from Steam and @TheLethalCoder already answered that's not directly possible.

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    'crap' seems a bit harsh. I think 'feature deprived' is probably more apt. – Pharap Apr 19 '17 at 17:46
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    @TimmyJim Recommending an alternative technology to accomplish a task is definitely worthy of an answer. – jpmc26 Apr 19 '17 at 23:40
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    This is the best answer. Honestly, Steam's UI for categories is pretty awful. Depressurizer alleviates a lot of that pain. – brokethebuildagain Apr 20 '17 at 17:46

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