Sims 3 refuses to uninstall itself

[hellomortals]

So, I bought The Sims 3 Base Game recently and didn't find it that fun, so decided I might as well uninstall it to make space on my hard drive. So I sauntered over to the uninstall button on steam, but when I checked my files the game was still there in all its glory, despite Steam listing it as uninstalled and telling me to reinstall it when I tested if i could still launch it.

The game is actually located in my Electronic Arts folder, next to The Sims 4. For some reason I decided to buy it on Steam instead of Origin, still not sure why. Maybe this has something to do with the fact it's completely intact, just separated from Steam.

I googled but found no results, and ruled out the option of simply manually deleting it because I'm a computer amateur and don't wanna mess anything up accidentally, especially if I want to reinstall it some day. Any advice or solutions?

[marstinson]

There are two sets of files: the game files and the user files. The game files get installed to wherever the client (Steam or Origin) wants them, but the user files are always in Documents/Electronic Arts. The game files get removed when you use Steam's uninstall function (for Origin, you use Windows' Add/Remove Programs feature), but you get the same result either way: game files gone (or mostly gone - it's always best to check and manually remove stragglers), user files still there. This isn't all that out of line with how other games handle uninstallation. The problem with TS3 is that the user files end of things can be as large a space hog as the game files, depending on what mods and custom content you have installed and how bloated your saves are. Mine, for example, is about 17GB of user files and 32GB of game files.

As for properly removing the files, the "delete" button isn't going to mess up anything. What you need to be concerned about is whether the registry information got removed as that can sometimes seriously interfere with reinstalling later. I'd recommend looking at cruinne's troubleshooting guide for the step-by-step on how to do that, but you could resort to a registry cleaner of some sort and get the same effect.

[hellomortals]

Hi! Thanks a lot for the reply. I can't find the page in cruinne's guide that covers the issue and I'm extremely confused as to what registry information even means. I've done some googling but nothing's really explaining what it is.

[cruinne]

Section 4.4. It says it's about removing a single EP but you can extrapolate to removing the game itself.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=279488894