steam saying games are busy

[Europas Strongest Crawler]

I'm trying to change the file location of some of my games to free up some space yet whenever i try to change the file location using steam it just says it failed because the game is busy.
what's up with that.

also it says i need to update a game to change instal location yet it requires more space to download the update.

[Crown]

Maybe use task manager and forcibly close steam and any games that are running in the background...? Then try it

[udance4ever]

man - can’t believe this problem is still around in 2024. I tried everything: going offline, clearing the download cache, force quitting, nuking files in the steamapps folder - it was stuck til no end and kept getting the “busy” error while trying to uninstall (what wasn’t installed).

what finally worked is reinstalling Steam and logging back in. Thankfully, it recognized my other games were downloaded and it automatically started the download that was stuck from scratch…

EDIT: but I spoke too soon, it got up to 2.29GB (of 38.79GB) for Witcher 3 and it’s stuck again. What’s with this app?!

[Mike]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.