Short answer, yes!
You can easily transfer Steam games to another computer, without having to redownload all the games again, using two methods actually.
The one method of moving Steam games to a new PC is much faster than the other, but I will cover both in the tutorial, starting with the faster of the two.
Method A : Steam Folder Copy
To get a copy of your Steam games to the new computer, you will need is a portable hard drive, such as the Samsung T5 500GB External Hard Drive ($224.00).
You could naturally do with a USB flash drive as well, such as the Samsung BAR Plus 128GB USB Flash Drive ($14.99), if you are looking at only transferring a few Steam games to a new PC.
The size of the drive, will really depend on how many Steam games you are looking at moving over to your new computer, and how big those games are. You can always do multiple transfers if your Steam game library is larger than the portable drive your have.
Anyway, let’s take a look at how to copy downloaded Steam games on another computer. If you want to copy Steam games that are still downloading, please see this article.
Naturally you can also use your internal network instead of portable drives, if you have a fast enough one.
Steam Games Library Location
The first you need to do, in order to copy Steam Games from one computer to another, is to find your Steam Games library.
For most, this will most likely be the default Steam library location, which is in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common.
Here you will see folders for each of your installed Steam games on that computer and drive. If you would like to know how to move your Steam games to another drive on the same computer, please see this article.
Alrighty, now that we have our Steam games folder, simply plug in your portable flash, or hard drive, then start to copy the folders of the games, that you would like to move to your other computer.
Once done, go to your new PC and plug the portable drive in. You will naturally first need to install Steam on the new computer first. Once done, open up the exact same default Steam library location (C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common) on the new PC and copy the game folder/s there.
Note, that these MUST be placed into this common folder otherwise Steam won’t recognize the game files.
Read this article if you’d like to have Steam installed in the default location, but have your games library folder on another drive, (or multiple drives) on the same computer (such as an SSD or NVMe drive).
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Install Steam Games from Copied Folders
Once all the folders are copied over, open up Steam on the new computer, to install the games.
Here you can either click the blue install button, or if you have multiple games, that you want to install from the folders you just copied over, you can either ‘SHIFT+LEFT CLICK’ or ‘CTRL+LEFT CLICK’, to highlight multiple games.
Once selected, ‘RIGHT-CLICK’ to bring up a pop-up menu, where you can then click ‘INSTALL’.
This will save you a lot of time, compared to installing each Steam game individually.
Now Steam will do its magic, as it searches for the already existing game files in \Steam\steamapps\common folder. Once it finds them, it will simply initiate the install without redownloading the entire game.
Note that the game folder must be in the correct folder, otherwise Steam won’t see it and it will start to download it from scratch.
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Method B : Steam Games Backup
The second method on how to move Steam games to another PC, is by using the Steam back-up feature.
You can read more about how to backup and restore your Steam games here, but I would not recommend using this method to move your Steam games to another computer, simply because of how much longer it takes, without any benefit.
Steam Folder Copy vs Backup Speed Test
In order to see which method would be faster to copy your steam games ot a new pc, I did a test using DIRT 4, which is a 35.9GB game.
- First I connected my external USB 3.1 SSD drive into my first (old) computer. I then told Steam to make a backup of DIRT 4, directly onto the external drive. This took 23:02mins
- I then plugged the external drive into my second (new) computer, telling Steam to restore the game from the backup file. This took 8:47mins
- Total time : 31:49mins
The second test was done using the same game, but simply using the folder copy method I’ve explained in this tutorial.
- I again connected the external drive into my first (old) computer, copying the entire DIRT 4 install folder across to it. This took 3:03mins
- I then copied this same folder into my Steam library folder on my second (new) computer. This took 3:55mins
- I then ran the install process. This took 3:52mins
- Total time : 10:50mins
So as you can see the copy method, is 3x faster than the backup method.
The reason for this is that, Steam has to do a full compression phase during the backup method, which takes a lot of time, and in this case is a waste of time, as we are decompressing it again right afterwards.
The only time you’d want to use the backup method to move your Steam games to a different computer, is if you’d want to split it across multiple folders.
For example:
If you are trying to move a 50GB game, and you only have a 16GB flash drive to copy the game across to another computer. In this case, you can tell Steam to divide the game backup into folders of 16GB, each for your convenience.
However, it’d still probably be quicker, by just copying sections of the install folder.
Besides this, the Steam backup feature is great to use for the purpose of having a backup of your games in case something happens to your original game hard drive, such as it getting stolen, broken or damaged.
It creates zip files of you original install folders, helping you save space on the backup drive.
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