Valve’s Steam game distribution service launched over 12 years ago, and for all of this time, you’ve never been able to permanently delete games from your Steam library. Earlier this year, the company started offering a refund service for games that were just purchased and played for only a very short period, but any game you’ve had for longer or actually played was destined to remain in your list.
This wasn’t a problem when gamers had a dozen or less games, but now that Steam has been around for over a decade and has remained the premier digital distribution service through that time, many gamers have hundreds, or even thousands of games, many of which will never be played again. This can lead to extremely cluttered libraries with no way to purge the old titles.
This is perfectly fine for game collectors, but not everyone wants to hoard 10-year-old games. Valve has finally added a feature for those people. You can now permanently remove games from your Steam library. There is no refund involved, and there’s no way to reverse the process short of buying the game again, but if you really don’t have any intention of every playing a particular game, you now have the option to get rid of it forever.
The process is rather simple. Log in to the support page at steampowered.com and click on Games, Software, etc. from there do a search for the game that you would like to remove from your account. Select the game’s support page from the results. On this screen you’ll see a new support option called “I want to permanently remove this game from my account.”
Clicking on that button will bring you to a final warning page explaining the permanence of the decision and one last confirmation request to remove the game.
This option may not be for everyone, but there are likely a few people who look forward to purging some of the old from their Steam libraries.
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