On Steam’s New Storage and Download Managers

Those among our readers who have opted into Steam’s beta client and its accompanying frequent updates have likely found a few new bells and whistles within Valve’s venerable digital distribution platform as of late. Thanks to another of those recent updates, whose contents I personally find so appealing that I actually opted back into the beta program just to use them after opting out some time ago, I’d like to share with you some of my thoughts on Steam’s newest beta features today.

To the best of my knowledge, the most recent beta version of the Steam client added two new features I find most noteworthy. Namely, these are a new storage manager and an updated download manager. Let’s start with the former of this pair. The process of accessing both of these features requires you to visit your downloads page. Once there, you should see a gear icon on the right side of the page. Clicking this will bring up the downloads section of your Steam settings.

Upon seeing this, you can click the button labeled “Steam Library Folders” to access the new storage manager. This new function of Steam will tell you in as clear a way as it can muster exactly which games you have installed on any drive connected to your computer which has its own designated Steam library folder. It will additionally report how much of each drive’s capacity is consumed by games, DLC, and other non-Steam-related files.

Furthermore, this system will tell you precisely how much space each game takes up on its home drive, how much of each game’s allotted space is composed of that particular title’s downloadable content, and the date you last played the game in question. For example, in my case, Steam’s new storage manager reports that Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is taking up 23.47 GB on its current home storage drive. Of that, 2.47 GB are taken up by content for the game that I’ve downloaded from the Steam Workshop, and 7.43 GB are occupied by the game’s official DLC.

I find this feature so appealing because it tells me everything I might possibly want to know about the currently installed portion of my library in a concise manner. As a considerable bonus, it does so within a single, easily-accessed menu. Thanks to this new storage manager, no longer will I have to delve into each of my storage drives’ library folders and determine which games I have installed where. Before this update, once I had that information, I would still have to examine each game on a drive individually to see how much space it occupies.

Only after I had spent all the necessary time to do all of that would I be able to make an informed decision as to which games I might want to transfer to a different drive or uninstall to free up space. This new update is quite handy because its features mean all that extra effort is no longer necessary. Anything Valve adds to Steam that makes organizing and managing my collection less tedious is quite a welcome change indeed as far as I’m concerned.

Moving on, I don’t have quite as much to say about the revamped downloads page. This update brings some nice quality-of-life tweaks to that portion of Steam, and it definitely looks nicer than it did before this patch in my opinion. If you’re curious about exactly what Valve has added that concerns Steam’s download page, you can check out their official patch notes for this update. There’s currently no word as to when this update’s features will officially roll out in a non-beta state, though.

Finally, if you want to download this beta patch for yourself to see why I decided to write an entire article about it, that process is remarkably simple. All you need to do to opt into the beta client is open your Steam settings, click “Account,” then make sure you’ve opted in via the section labeled “Beta Participation.” Be forewarned that you’ll probably have to update Steam fairly frequently if you decide to download the beta client due to the frequency of tweaks and new features. However, if Valve keeps rolling out handy new features like these, I’d say the updates are worth any potential annoyances.