Steam makes it easy to have a virtual library of hundreds, even thousands, of games. Getting rid of those games has been a little more difficult, but now you can ... if you want.
Why exactly you might want to permanently delete something you paid money for from your account is another question entirely, but Steam now gives you the power to do just that. Have a game you bought and will likely never play again? You can delete it. Buy a game, only to hate it with every fiber of your being? Erase it. Does just reading the very title of a game on your Steam Library page fill you with seething rage? Make it go away forever.
To delete your games yourself, just follow these steps:
First, go to Help and select Steam Support. Select "Games, Software, Etc." from the list. Select whatever game you want to make go away forever, and then select "I want to permanently remove this game from my account." Finally, select "OK, remove the selected games from my account."
It's an interesting feature discovered by some of the gamers over on the gaming forum NeoGAF (via The Verge), but it still calls into question why exactly you would want to delete your virtual games in the first place. They don't take up physical space, and as long as they aren't installed, they don't take up hard drive space, either. You can file all the games you don't want to play or despise under a category titled something like: "Games I hate," and then never open that folder ever again. How long this feature has been live on Steam isn't entirely clear, but it sure would be interesting to see data behind how often the feature is used.
If you bought a game physically and disliked it, you could always sell it. However, that's not possible with digital games. One user in a NeoGAF post from 2013 laments not having a way to get rid of all the games bought almost instinctively during Steam Sales, many of them lackluster titles that the user has no intention of ever playing again. Categorizing them all into a "bad game" category, the user writes, isn't much of a solution, because that just makes them feel bad for wasting their money. It may be two years too late, but Valve has finally offered a solution. Let the great Steam Library Purge of 2015 begin.
