HOWTO: Windows: Tranferring Steam games to a new computer

If you've got any games from Valve, you've probably come across their gaming client, Steam. Even if you buy a physical copy of their games, you still have to install this Steam client and download a heap of stuff before you can play. I had Half-Life 2 as well as a number of downloaded games and demos on my old laptop and I didn't want to waste a lot of bandwidth by downloading everything again. I couldn't find anything authoritative on whether you can just copy the game files over to your new computer rather than just installing Steam and having it download all your games alone.

So I just tried it. The largest directory in the Steam installation on my old computer was /Steam/SteamApps and it seems to contain large resource files for all my game. So here's what I did.

1. Download and install the Steam client from http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php but don't login to your account yet. Just quit the application.
2. Copy the /Steam/SteamApps folder from your old computer to the equivalent folder on your new computer.
3. Run Steam and log into your account. You should find all your games, ready to play with your saved games intact as an added bonus.

Monday, July 30, 2007 in howto  | Permalink |  Comments (1)