Steam – How to change the location Steam saves games on

When you install a game, Steam places it in ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/ and creates an alias in ~/Applications/ which you can use to launch the game. It does this because different games may have different directory structures—unfortunately, not all Mac games come in neatly-packaged app bundles. Because of this, it's not really possible (or a good idea) to trick Steam into putting the game data in /Applications/ instead.

It's safe to exclude ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/ from your backups since no user data is kept there, only the game installs. Save files are kept elsewhere in your home directory, depending on the game.

If you really want to keep game data out of your home directory, you can make a symbolic link at ~/Library/Application Support/SteamApps/ pointing to somewhere else on your disk, perhaps in /Users/Shared/. Here's how you do this:

1. Shut down Steam.
2. Move the ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/ folder to wherever you want it to be.
3. Open up Terminal and change to the Steam folder by typing:
   cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam
4. Create a symbolic link in this folder pointing to the place you moved the SteamApps folder to:
   ln -s /Users/Shared/Steam/ SteamApps

You don't actually save your address anywhere in Steam.

You can change your location in by modifying your Steam profile, and you can fill out a new billing address when you buy a new game. Before you buy anything, your address isn't used for anything.