Steam beta appears to finally offer users choice of install locations
By Tim Colwill on September 13, 2012 at 9:26 am
One of the biggest bugbears about the generally-excellent Steam delivery service has been its complete failure to offer you an actual choice of where to install your games. Now this appears to have been solved in an upcoming beta patch, as noticed by sharp-eyed Redditors.
You’ll need to opt into the Steam beta to do it, and from there it’s a matter of changing some launch options and bringing up the service’s developer console to specify some alternative install locations manually. But once you do that, you’re all set to spread your Steam install across more than just one hard drive. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a great guide on how to get it going — use at your own risk, naturally.
Hopefully this means that Steam is on the way to including this themselves, and in a manner that doesn’t require any sort of voodoo or jiggery-pokery. Keep an eye on the patch notes.
Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun (Thanks, PalZer0)
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i don’t really see the point. Install steam to the HDD that you want to store your games on. bam done?
Great, now I can actually have steam games on my SSD
Also, your link to Rock Paper Shotgun is broken, it has a quotation mark on the end.
Hooray, no more setting up symlinks all the time for the games I want on my SSD
WOOOOOOOOOOO!
Absolutely brilliant news, I’ll be making use of this for Borderlands 2 next week :)
If you have an SSD this isn’t possible due to the significantly smaller size.
Awesome!
I saw this the other day and am relieved as I can now spread my steam games across multiple HDDs (with maybe a few on my SSD) thus not leaving all my eggs in one basket. I also think why it has taken them this long to implement such a simple feature, every other download client features this.
Huzzah! Next on the list it’d be nice if they expanded options for customizing your games library list.
It’s now officially supported in the latest Big Picture beta update.
WTB Edit button please.
More info on the latest Big Picture beta update can be found here.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bigpicture#announcements/detail/1729636893858276272
Yup, one benefit is that older/retro games that don’t need to load a kajillion bajiggerbytes of textures can go on a big old slow HDD, while newer, more storage-intensive games can go on faster drives.
Plus it has always annoyed me on principle that my games are buried under Steam\Steamapps\common\whatever instead of c:\games\whatever, where all games rightfully belong.
Awesome, can properly install games on my SSD now. I’ve done it via symbolic linking which is easy enough, but still … this makes life easier.
gua5d1an01,
It’s a great feature for those of us with several hundred games on steam. I like to keep everything installed but my 1.5tb steam drive doesnt cut it anymore.