Guide: Play Your Steam Games from an SD Card

A quick guide for using Gameplay with an External Drive.

Warning

Before using this guide, it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you backup any game data that is not saved already to the Steam cloud.

You will be moving your Steam Directory entirely from your computer to your external drive. Make sure that when following the guide, you DO NOT delete your SteamApp folder as it may contain your game data.

Note: We are looking into a potential bug with V2 and using an SD card. If you get an error that says "Please Launch Gameplay from Steam" try going into the SteamApps > common and into Gameplay. Launch from the GestureWorksGameplayLauncher.exe. That seems to be fixing the issue so far.

Introduction

Bringing your entire Steam library with you on the go, Gestureworks Gameplay is great for playing your favorite games on many different platforms.

With memory being a concern on some new devices, using external memory is the obvious choice for some users. If you happen to have a very large game library on Steam, this is the guide for you. Be it SD, USB, or Ext HDD, this quick walkthrough will show you how to move and play your Steam library with Gameplay straight from your external drive. Running Steam and Steam games from the external drive should help with any issues that might arise from running Steam and Steam games from separate locations.

NOTE: Before continuing with this guide, you may want to consider if gaming from an external source is the right choice for you. When running any game from external memory, you may experience a drop in performance and increased loading times. This is due to the need for your computer to constantly have to retrieve data from your external drive.

If this does not sound like something you'd be interested in, another option you might consider is keeping your games installed internally on your device and swapping out save states from external memory. This would be a great alternative for gamers who tend to stick with one game for awhile as opposed to jumping from game to game. Remember that by doing so, you will be using more of the internal memory on your device.

If you still wish to continue, then without further ado:

How To

In this guide, we will be moving the Steam folder located in your Program Files to your external drive and launching Gameplay from that path. Make sure you create a backup for your Steam games and saves just in case!

Before we begin, make sure you have your external drive plugged in and that Steam is already on your computer. Let's begin!

Step One

The first step is to go into your Program Files and locate the Steam folder.
Click into this folder and delete ALL of the content EXCEPT for SteamApps & Steam.exe[/url] (your game data is in the SteamApps).

Step Two

The second step now is to simply move what remains of the Steam folder (SteamApps & Steam.exe) onto your external drive.

Step Three

Hard so far right? The third step is to now go into the Steam folder on your external drive and click on the Steam.exe, this will make Steam launch, and download some extra files it needs to run.
NOTE: This first launch takes quite a bit of time, requires you to confirm the computer from your email, and brings up a windows admin question.

Proceed with Steam's setup and you will be well on your way to playing your games on the go. Log into your Steam account and everything will be back as it was. But now, Steam is running directly from your external drive!

Step Four

Before you launch a game, you want to make sure that all of the files needed to play that game are there. So the next step is find the game on your library and right click it. Choose Properties, then Local Files, and Click on "Verify Integrity Of Game Cache". Steam will make sure all of the files needed to play the game are there as well as check if any corrupted files exist.

Last Step

Finally: Launch Gameplay and make sure to link the executable to its new path! Now you are ready to play. Remember though that, as expected, your first launch from Gameplay will close Steam, don't worry, just go back and launch the game again.

Notes

When Switching Devices

If you are switching devices, you should keep the following in mind:

Although many games on Steam make use of the Steam Cloud storage to keep track of your game progress, some do not. This is also true for any games you've bought outside of Steam.

If this is the case, make sure that you are able to locate your game's save data and move it over to your new device along with Steam. If you are not switching devices, and only attempting to run games from your external drive on the same device, you should not need to worry about this.

To find out whether or not your game uses the Steam Cloud, do the following:

• Navigate over to your game library.
  
• Switch the view to List Mode
  
• Find your game in the list.
  
• If there is a cloud displayed in the game's row, the game makes use of the Steam Cloud.
  
• If there is not a cloud, then the game may actually store its data directly on your computer. If this is the case, you may be able to search for the directory for the data online.

If your game is not from Steam, or is not downloaded from another server (like Origin), it most likely stores data directly on your computer.

Issues with running games from an external drive

As you may know, running a game from an external drive has its issues. The main one being "bottlenecking". The games you play will take a long time to load and save because they have to pass through the USB or SD port.

Other issues come from in-level loading. The tablet format, as you may know, slows down on more graphically intense games, or points when many things are on the screen at one time. You can imagine then, that playing a game in this way may slow things down even further.

Additionally, make sure that you only log into Steam on one device and think about turning off Steam pop-ups. These seem to add even more lag in-game.

However, after a level is loaded, games generally run smoothly and work just as they would if you were playing them from the computer hard drive!

Happy gaming!

[PantheraLeo04]

It won't let me delete the files because it says the are currently running even though the task manager said they aren't

[kazoo]

I did this with a 128GB Sandisk sd card on an HP Laptop and the Space available is being displayed as 0mb when I tried to install Garry's Mod. Have any tips to help?

[westmoon]

i own a HP windows 10 chromebook and this is a little confusing for me to understand how do i get help with doing this i do need it

[Rocket]

you have a fake samsung evo sd card... (knock offs) from china that only have 100 mb to 4gb storage capacity (fake storage)

[Gunnerman Bill]

Any idea why steam seems to struggle to download to an SD card when it's just set up as an extra library folder? It'll download like 100 megs and then just stop for a long time, using a (model number) MB-MGCGB/AM