Steam is the most popular platform for distributing games in digital format, so much so that its data numbers are in the exabytes, although frankly, for years it is much more than a simple storeis a meeting place for PC game lovers to socialize, share experiences and enjoy additional services such as streaming and downloading additional content.

I vividly remember the first time I downloaded and started using Steam, it was to play the copy of Half-Life 2 I had just bought. It was in late 2004 so I can tell I’ve been using Steam for about 19 yearsand that I have personally experienced the development of this platform.

In general, my experience is positive, I never had any serious problem, although when I started using different storage drives, I encountered more than one Steam did not identify installed games after reinstalling the operating system. It’s nothing serious, but if you don’t know what to do, chances are you’ll end up thinking you’ll have to delete and reinstall the games.

Doing it is not just like that big waste of timebut also represents a large number of write cycles and that it will unnecessarily shorten the life of your SSDs. Fortunately, you can avoid this in a very simple way, and I will explain it in detail in this article.

Why doesn’t Steam recognize installed games?

This normally happens according to three reasons which are quite easy to understand:

1. If you have moved the directory where the games are installed. So for example if you move it from drive C:\ to drive D:\.
2. Also if you have removed some of the installed game content. The missing files that you deleted, the game will not work.
3. In case you reinstalled the operating system and have games installed on another storage drive that were not affected.

The most common causes are moving the location of games in the belief that we can free up space on one disk and occupy it on another, where we have more storage capacity available, and also due to reinstallations of the operating system.

If you’ve done either of these two things and found that Steam no longer recognizes your installed games, don’t worry, you don’t need to reinstall the games, there is a way to fix it in seconds.

In case you have deleted part of the games, you will have to verify the integrity of the game files and repair the installation. To do this, just right-click on the game name, go to “Properties” and click on the verification option, as you can see in the attached image.

Steps for Steam to recognize your installed games

If you’ve moved your games to another location or if you’ve reinstalled Windows, go to Steam. Click on Steam in the upper left corner and follow the path “Settings > Downloads > Steam Library Folders”. The section dedicated to the storage manager will open and here we can find the directories where we have our games installed. For that we only have to do Click the “+” icon and find the directory where we have the games installed.

Once this is done, the installed games they will be added to the Steam library without further ado, saving us time and typing cycles that it would be necessary to reinstall them. If that doesn’t work, try verifying the integrity of each game’s files and if that doesn’t fix anything, which would be pretty weird, I’m sorry to say that you’ll have to reinstall the games.