How do I move Steam games to another location on disk on my Mac?

Solution 1:

When you install a game, Steam places it in ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/ and creates an alias in ~/Applications/ which you can use to launch the game. It does this because different games may have different directory structures—unfortunately, not all Mac games come in neatly-packaged app bundles. Because of this, it's not really possible (or a good idea) to trick Steam into putting the game data in /Applications/ instead.

It's safe to exclude ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/ from your backups since no user data is kept there, only the game installs. Save files are kept elsewhere in your home directory, depending on the game.

If you really want to keep game data out of your home directory, you can make a symbolic link at ~/Library/Application Support/SteamApps/ pointing to somewhere else on your disk, perhaps in /Users/Shared/. Here's how you do this:

1. Shut down Steam.
2. Move the ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/ folder to wherever you want it to be.
3. Open up Terminal and change to the Steam folder by typing:
   cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam
4. Create a symbolic link in this folder pointing to the place you moved the SteamApps folder to:
   ln -s /Users/Shared/Steam/ SteamApps

Solution 2:

Here is another way.

1. Make a new folder for Steam. I made one called "Steam Games" at the root of my big drive.
2. Go to Steam (menu item) -> Preferences
3. Click on the "Downloads" tab in Preferences
4. Click on the "STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS" button in the Downloads page
5. Select the new folder, it will be added to the list.
6. Quite Steam
7. In the finder, copy the SteamApps folder from your Library/Application Support folder to the new folder you added in step (5)
8. Open Steam
9. In the Library, Right-click on a game and select "Delete Local Content..."
10. Right click on the game again, select "Install Game..."
11. Most games will ask you where you would like to install it. This will be a pop-up listing the two folders, the original and the new one. Select the new one. Some games will not ask you and simply move on to the install, but luckily these ones tend to see the file in the new location and do the right thing.
12. Steam will start the install process, but will first say it's "Discovering" the existing content. After a few moments it's done, no download.

You can see where any of your games are installed by:

1. Right-click on the game, and select Properties from the menu
2. Select the "LOCAL FILES" tab from the window that appears
3. Click the "BROWSE LOCAL FILES..." button

If you did it right, the window that opens should be in the new location. You can check by Command-Clicking on the folder icon in the title bar (among other methods).

Moving a big library using this method will take some time, but it will actually move it, and they will download there in the future.

NOTE: This did not work for all files. Some, notably CivIV (which I haven't played since V) re-downloaded. HL also seemed to be an issue.

Solution 3:

Most of these answers are OBSOLETE as of 2015 (or earlier).

The Mac steam client allows you go choose a location for installing the game, including "Create new Steam library on drive /Volumes/DriveName"

Maury Markowitz's answer is also a good one, but I can't vote it up yet... :-/