Uninstall Steam without losing your games: move steamapps first

The official way: move steamapps, uninstall, Automatic

These are Valve's Windows 10 instructions from its Steam Support article. For older versions of Windows, Valve points to Microsoft's instructions for removing an application.

1. 01

   Exit Steam

   Valve's first step, before anything is moved or removed.

2. 02

   Move steamapps if you want to keep your games

   To keep game installations, move the steamapps folder out of C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam. Valve also mentions that backups of all game content can be created for reinstallation.

3. 03

   Uninstall from Settings

   Click the Windows Start button and select the gear icon for Settings, select Apps, search for and click the Steam entry, then click Uninstall.

4. 04

   Choose Automatic

   Select the Automatic option and click Next, then click Finish to uninstall Steam.

5. 05

   If the uninstall does not work

   Valve says you may have inadvertently damaged your Steam installation, and that you may first need to reinstall Steam to repair it before it can be removed.

6. 06

   Last resort: remove Steam manually

   Exit Steam, copy steamapps out if you want it, and delete all of the contents of the Steam directory. Valve then lists registry keys to delete: Steam under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Valve on 32-bit Windows or under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Valve on 64-bit Windows, and Steam under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve. It warns that the registry requires extreme care and that this option is a last resort.

What can stay behind, and what to check

Valve names the Steam directory and the registry keys in its manual removal steps, so this guide names only those. These read-only PowerShell commands show whether Steam is still running, whether a steamapps folder is still inside the default Steam directory, whether the registry keys Valve lists exist, and whether Windows still lists Steam. A name match is a lead, not proof.

Get-Process | Where-Object Name -match '^steam' | Format-Table Name, Id
Test-Path "${env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\Steam\steamapps"
Test-Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Valve\Steam', 'HKCU:\Software\Valve\Steam'
Get-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*',
  'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*' |
  Where-Object DisplayName -match 'Steam' | Format-Table DisplayName, DisplayVersion
Get-Service -DisplayName '*Steam*' | Format-Table Name, DisplayName, Status
Get-ScheduledTask |
  Where-Object { $_.TaskName -match 'Steam' -or $_.TaskPath -match 'Steam' } |
  Format-Table TaskPath, TaskName, State