Stream or Download?

[CP_Medic]

Hi. I just bought a game on Steam. When playing, does the game just stream from a Steam server or do the games actually download into the C drive? If they download and install, where do they install? I only ask as I would like to access the programme files but can not find them anywhere on my C drive.

[Tito Shivan]

Steam does not Stream games. Your games need to bedownloaded and you play them locally.
Steam installs your games in your Steam folder (on a folder called 'steamapps') by default. But you can set up a library on a different space on your drive.

You can see it in your client preferences -> storage

[Draconic NEO]

Pretty sure that game streaming functionality needs the game to be installed somewhere first then you can stream it from there to another device (what steam link is for). To my knowledge steam offers no cloud gaming functionality which is what you are asking about when you talk about "streaming games". Most people are against that FYI because they want to be able to play their single-player games or multiplayer LAN games offline, and cloud gaming is often very much forced in the industry, and thus it left a bad taste in the mouths of many gamers (especially after Stadia shut down and people lost all their games).

[Anonymous Helper]

There already is GeForce NOW that offers cloud gaming functionality for ton of Steam games for those who want it. Valve has no reason to invest billions to build their own cloud gaming platform. Also Steam already offers "remote play" feature to Stream your game from your computer to any supported device.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/
https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay

[Spawn of Totoro]

Publicado originalmente por CP_Medic:

Hi. I just bought a game on Steam. When playing, does the game just stream from a Steam server or do the games actually download into the C drive? If they download and install, where do they install? I only ask as I would like to access the programme files but can not find them anywhere on my C drive.

Downloaded.

Find the game on the left side of your library. Right click and "Manage" then "Browse local files." This will take you to where the game is installed.

Same games also keep other files in different areas, so depending on what you need to modify, you may need to look elsewhere.

[Ben Lubar]

Publicado originalmente por Draconic NEO:

Pretty sure that game streaming functionality needs the game to be installed somewhere first then you can stream it from there to another device (what steam link is for). To my knowledge steam offers no cloud gaming functionality which is what you are asking about when you talk about "streaming games". Most people are against that FYI because they want to be able to play their single-player games or multiplayer LAN games offline, and cloud gaming is often very much forced in the industry, and thus it left a bad taste in the mouths of many gamers (especially after Stadia shut down and people lost all their games).

NVIDIA GeForce Now is basically a bunch of computers with NVIDIA graphics cards that have a wide variety of Steam games preinstalled and you can borrow one to play any Steam game you own that's in their list of supported games. Developers can add their games to that list by checking a box in the Steam admin panel. There are other services that do similar things. I've been contacted by a few asking if they can put my (free) game on their systems and it got to the point where I made an FAQ article about it[developer.reactivedrop.com].

Stadia's problem was that they were trying to own every part of the system, made some unbelievable claims, and (because it's a Google project) shut down entirely after about a year. Other streaming services are just selling access to a computer to play your games on, so if they shut down all you lose access to is that computer, not your games library.