It looks like there’s a neat new change coming to Steam that should improve how you manage your storage on a busy PC. As spotted by The Verge, a small but super helpful update to the platform’s client beta means that you can now see the size of a game before you go and boop that install button – so if you’re wrangling with some already-stacked storage, this should help you juggle things more easily.
If you’re opted into the Steam client beta (which you can find via the platform’s settings menu) you’ll now see a new UI feature right next to the big blue install button on a game’s page in your library. Where the live version of the client currently includes your ‘last played’ information, in the beta version there’s a ‘space required’ UI element that tells you how big that game is. This information normally only pops up when you’ve already hit the button and got the thing installing.
It’s only a minor change, and the live client doesn’t make things too tricky at all, as you can always cancel a game’s download as soon as you’ve kicked it into gear, but it’s nonetheless a really handy update.
I just gave the client beta a go, and it was undeniably helpful flicking through a whole bunch of games and being able to see at a glance how much of a bite they’d take out of my storage without having to start and stop installs. For those on rigs with smaller storage, this change will certainly help with the mental Tetris of working out how many games you can have downloaded at any one time.
While this change has only rolled out to the beta client for now, hopefully we should see the update come to the live platform soon. If you’re looking for guidance on how to opt into the Steam beta, you can find Valve’s instructions at that link.
In other Steamy news (heh), we learned this week that all games on the upcoming Steam Deck will support AMD FSR upscaling, and we now know how it’ll compare in size to other handhelds, too. Here’s a clue: it’s a chonky thing.