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?
Best Answer
Move the subfolder
/steamapps/
in a safe place before uninstalling Steam, then do the following steps:/steamapps/
backup to the new/steamapps/
subfolderAt 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.