Steam’s Storage & Download Updates Now Out of Beta

Back in early August, I penned an editorial about what I consider to be wonderful new features that had been recently added to Steam’s beta client. More specifically, these features are an updated Downloads page that provides Steam users with considerably more information than the previous version did, as well as a new storage manager that allows for the mass uninstallation of multiple games from a single drive (among several other useful features).

Well, as of September 9th, 2021, these updates are officially out of beta and available to all Steam users. This news was announced by Valve on that date via a post on the official Steam blog. Valve’s blog post details all the new, handy bells and whistles that Steam’s most recent non-beta update added. Allow me to briefly run down some of these aspects in case you might not be aware of what this patch contains.

Let’s begin with the updates to the Downloads manager. Valve reports that the first change to this feature dictates that “[w]hen a game/update is actively downloading, it will now display the total progression completed for the download or update. Previously, the progress bar would only display the downloading content progress but not the disk allocation process, which would make an update appear completed when it was not.”

That’s just the first of what I see as a slew of nice quality-of-life changes in this update. To name a couple more changes to the Downloads manager, your download queue can now be completely reordered simply by dragging and dropping titles to precisely where you want them to be. Furthermore, when a game is actively downloading, you now have the option to instruct Steam to launch that game as soon as the download is complete and to suspend download throttling for the duration of the current download, assuming you have download throttling enabled in the first place.

Let’s briefly move on to the major changes to storage management. With this update installed, whenever you access the “Steam Library Folders” section of your Steam settings, you’ll see the new Storage Manager. This new feature allows you to easily manage all the Steam-related content you have installed across every drive connected to your computer which has an active Steam library folder. For example, it allows you to see exactly how much space each individual game is occupying on any such drive.

It even goes the extra mile by breaking down how much of any given game’s consumed space is reserved for things like downloadable content and anything you’ve downloaded from the Steam Workshop. As I alluded to earlier, this new storage manager will also present you with a list of all games installed on a given drive. On that list, you can either uninstall multiple games at once or move them to a different drive with just a few clicks. These features have already come in incredibly handy for me personally, and I suspect they might do the same for at least some portion of our audience as well.

Those are by no means the only updates present in this new version of Steam. However, they’re the main changes I wanted to cover in this article. If you’d like to read up on everything I omitted from this piece for brevity’s sake, I highly recommend checking out Valve’s aforementioned blog post. I’ve found myself saying this fairly often over the decade I’ve been a Steam user, but I can’t wait to see what other new tricks Valve might have up its collective sleeve if these updates are any indication of that.