Steam library out of control

A couple of AAA titles at 150 GB, three older games you forgot, shader caches, workshop mods - and half a terabyte is gone. Steam shows per-game sizes, but only inside its own walls; the full picture including caches and leftovers lives on the disk itself.

What Steam shows and what it hides

• Steam > Settings > Storage lists installed games by size and lets you uninstall - use it as the first pass.
• It does not count: shader caches (steamapps\shadercache, tens of GB on DX12 titles), workshop content of uninstalled games (steamapps\workshop), leftovers of removed games in steamapps\common.
• Other launchers - Epic, Battle.net, EA - each keep their own libraries and caches in their own places.

The full picture on a map

Scan the game drive with a disk analyzer: every launcher, cache and leftover shows up as a sector proportional to its size. It is normal to discover that "deleted" games left 30-40 GB of workshop mods and shader caches behind. In CleanMyWin those leftovers can go to the Recycle Bin on the spot - reversible if you deleted the wrong thing.

Reclaiming space safely

• Uninstall through the launcher first - it cleans registrations properly.
• Saves are almost never inside the game folder: they live in Documents or the cloud. Uninstalling a game does not lose progress.
• Shader caches regenerate on the next launch - safe to clear for games you rarely play.
• Move rarely played games to another drive: Steam does this natively via Storage settings.

Frequently asked

Sources and official documentation: Microsoft: Free up drive space in Windows, Microsoft: Storage Sense, Microsoft: WSL disk space, DaisyDisk, WizTree, WinDirStat, TreeSize