Maybe you aren't playing a particular game as much, or you need to free up disk space. Games can take up a lot of room, especially when you’ve got several alongside apps, documents, videos and files. In this article, we cover how to uninstall Steam games on a Mac, which is a little more tricky than dragging it to the trash.
Uninstalling Steam games involves going through the application itself, which will delete the game on your Mac. However, you will still own the game (it will remain in your Steam account) but to play it again you will need to download it.
How to uninstall Steam?
Jul 14, 2018 Because Steam is a cross-platform compatible app you can use this method to uninstall any Steam game from any Mac, Windows PC, or even Linux. How to Uninstall Games from Steam on Mac, Windows Linux. We’ll show you how to uninstall games from Steam and remove them from your computer, thereby freeing up whatever disk space they were taking up.
Steam isn’t a very lightweight app. It usually takes a lot of space and may be responsible for your Mac running slower than it should. In case you want to quit Steam for good, we will help you to uninstall it.
Pc Games On Mac Steam
- Quit Steam.
- Open Finder and go to Applications.
- Locate Steam and drag it to the Bin.
- In Finder, press Command + Shift + G.
- Type
~/Library/Application Support/and click Go. - Locate Steam and open it.
- In the folder, remove everything except “steamapps” file to keep your Steam games.
- Empty the Bin.
Although you removed the app and some of its files from your Mac, the leftover items may still be left. To search for the remaining data, press Command + Shift + G to open Finder’s Go to the folder menu. Type these paths in the form and look for files that have “steam” or “valve” in their names:
~/Library/Logs/…
~/Library/Caches/…
~/Library/Cookies/…
~/Library/Preferences/…
~/Library/LaunchAgents/…
~/Library/Saved Application State/…
Once you find such files, move them to the Bin. All Steam-related files are now deleted.
There is another, quicker way to remove Steam. Using CleanMyMac X, an app cleaner notarized by Apple, you can delete the app and its associated files altogether. If you install CleanMyMac X, it will remind you to remove app leftovers when you drag the app to Bin. That’s how it looks:
You can then click Open CleanMyMac and remove remaining files using the Leftover tab in Uninstaller module. Move to the next step to find out how to delete Steam games on Mac.
How to uninstall Steam games manually
1. Open the Steam application — either in your Dock, Desktop or Applications folder.
2. Go to the Library tab in the app. Here you should see every game you've downloaded and bought through Steam.
3. Now, right-click (or press Control and Click) on the game you want to uninstall from your Mac. A drop-down of options should appear.
4. Click Uninstall.
5. Steam will ask if you’re certain you want to delete it, confirming that it will uninstall the local game files from your Mac.
6. Click Delete and wait a few minutes for the game to be removed.
Larger Steam games will take a little longer to uninstall. It will show you an uninstalling message alongside the game title in your library until it’s complete. Once that is done, if you check disk space it should show you’ve got more than you had before. Repeat the process if you want to free up even more space, or simply remove a few more distractions from your Mac.
Or maybe you want to take this distraction purge one step further. Perhaps it’s time to remove Steam from your Mac entirely. There are two ways you can do this.
You might be wondering: can you uninstall Steam without losing games? Thankfully, no, all of your games will remain in your Steam account and on your Mac, so this method won’t free up much space. However, it does mean you can re-download the app again when you are ready.
Removing every Steam game, the local files and associated data, means going through steps 1 to 6 again, and then deleting the app from your Mac. Freeing up space you need and removing some enjoyable but time-consuming distractions.
Whichever option you chose, your games will stay in the Steam library, which is good for those worried that if I uninstall Steam what happens to my games? They’re all still in the library, so if you want to download any of them and play again, you’ve not lost anything.
How to uninstall Steam games on Mac without Steam
If you have already said goodbye to Steam, but have found some of Steam games on your Mac, you can delete those too. Removing Steam games is much easier, with a special Uninstaller module of CleanMyMac X. With its help you can uninstall Steam games in a few clicks, regardless you have Steam installed on your Mac or not. Just follow these steps:
- Download CleanMyMac X for free and launch the app.
- Go to the Uninstaller tab.
- Choose the games you want to delete.
- Click Uninstall.
You can as well delete Steam using CleanMyMac X's Uninstaller. Here's how it looks like:
Say you’ve deleted unneeded Steam games, or even cleared out your entire Steam library, and you still need more space. This storage issue could be a sign that your Mac needs a cleanup.
CleanMyMac X will help you with that. Just click the Scan button and the app will find all useless files you can safely remove. Most Mac users find over 74GB of junk when they run the program. Good free games compatible for mac app store login. Your Mac will run faster too, so you can enjoy an enhanced gaming experience.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
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The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows .. or do you?
There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.
GeForce Now
PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.
For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!
The Wine Project
The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.
Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.
As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.
You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.
Steam On Macbook Pro
Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.
CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.
My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.
Boxer
If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.
With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.
Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.
Some final thoughts
In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.
Games On Mac Free
Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
How To Play Pc Games On Mac Steam
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