It seems the commonapps folder has deleted itself.

[Mastofwar]

As the title says, the commonapps folder for steam deleted itself. All the games i had installed are showing up now uninstalled in steam, they do appear in the windows install/uninstall, but they have no icon, and windows can't detect how big they are (usually on the right side, you'll see when they were installed, and program/app size but i can only see the date when they were installed).

I can't quite recall 100% what the HDD capacity was at before the unexpected deletion of the folder, but it seems that the space that the installed games were occupying is now freed up (still not 100% sure about this tho).

If i try and uninstall the games from windows, it just takes me to steam for a few seconds, nothing happens, and then the game is deleted from the programs list in windows, no additional space is being shown as freed up in file explorer.

Most recent thing that i can think of that would've caused this is the update of video driver downloaded directly from the NVIDIA website (so no use of third party software, mind you i also avoid geforce experience, so i downloaded and executed the .exe directly), i also updated Origin launcher in order to play the new Battlefield open beta, this all happened yesterday. In the evening when i launched Steam, since i have it set to auto-update, it installed a new update, and since then, i have this problem.

I had one game on another drive, a SSD this time, and there, the commonapps folder containing the one game i had installed on there, was still there, and launching it in the folder manually worked in getting steam to recognize the game was installed (it too was getting recognized as uninstalled before i did this). Although if go to steam settings -> downloads -> steam library folders, it only shows me the HDD not the SSD.

Does anybody know what might have caused this? Is there anyway to check if the games are still being kept somewhere and taking up space? If the games are still there, is there anyway to recover them without having to redownload several hundreds of gigabytes of data? I'll leave my specs down below, i'm available for more details if needed

My PC is custom built
MOBO: MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max
CPU: AMD RYZEN 5 3600x
GPU: ASUS ROG Nvidia GTX 960 2GB
RAM: G.SKILL 2x8GB cl15 at 3200mhz
OS: Windows 10 pro on version 21H1

Thank you in advance.

[Ajam]

I can only speak to the install/uninstall feature via windows. Windows will show icons and programs that were recently installed on your computer even if they aren't installed now. Just an fyi that it isnt a very good diagnostic tool because of that

[crunchyfrog]

Yup, this is common issue when the appmanifest (I think) files get deleted or can't be seen by Steam. It literally can't see your games because it doesn't know here they are.

What you can first try is going to Steam Settings > Downloads and on that window remove the drives in question from being looked at and used by Steam. Then add them again. Normally this will then make them return.

However, if it still persists then it is likely something has messed things up. This could be some antivuirus update or something else like a Windows 10 update (I've had that). I think it a bit doubtful it was a graphics card driver update, but stranger things have happened.

A lot of people suffer this problem when they've been using sleep mode too, as Steam really doesn't like that, especially if tyou have external hard drives like I do.

Plus you should always make sure that your drives are installed and recognised in windows before starting steam, and have all power saving settings off.

[Mastofwar]

Not sure if this could help find the problem, but i tried re-downloading one of the games i had installed, and in the download section, before the game, steam downloaded a certain "steamworks common redistributables" on its own. Leading me to believe the steam update was corrupted in some way maybe.