in Windows Development & Utilities

Removing Steam Games from Programs and Features (Add/Remove Programs) Windows

When installed, games from Steam are registered in Windows’ uninstall list as well as in Steam. The uninstall items in “add / remove programs” serve little purpose as they are links directly to Steam’s app management (easily accessed from Steam’s UI), and if you relocate your Steam folder these will become broken. The following is two commands to run and a downloadable batch file (also contains an admin check) that remove all Steam apps from the Windows uninstall list. I figure it may come in handy if someone can’t be bothered writing or doesn’t know how to write it themselves. You will need to run these with administrative privileges.

Download: remove-steam-uninstall-links-from-windows.bat (zipped)
sha1: cc540bc3e4022de0d45424e7bfd9b47045031b75

@for /F "delims=" %a in ('reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall ^| findstr /C:"Steam App"') do @reg delete "%a" /f
@for /F "delims=" %a in ('reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall ^| findstr /C:"Steam App"') do @reg delete "%a" /f

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25 Comments

  1. The fact we have to resort to this to keep our PC’s clean of this junk is a travesty…. they should know better, some people have 200+ games.

    [ ] Check to place game shortcuts on desktop
    [ ] Check to place games in add/remove programs.

    Duh.

  2. I cleaned up the code a bit and added a counter for amount of items removed. Feel free to use :)

    @echo off
    
    setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
    title Remove Steam uninstall links from Programs and Features
    
    net session >nul 2>&1
    if %errorlevel% EQU 0 (
        set /a count = 0
        
        for /F "delims=" %%a in ( 'reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall ^| findstr /C:"Steam App"' ) do (
            reg delete "%%a" /f >nul
            set /a count += 1
        )
        
        for /F "delims=" %%a in ( 'reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall ^| findstr /C:"Steam App"' ) do (
          reg delete "%%a" /f >nul
          set /a count += 1
        )
        
        if !count! GTR 0 ( echo !count! item^(s^) removed! ) else ( echo No items removed. )
    ) else ( echo Missing Administrator Priveleges; right click script and choose 'Run as administrator'. )
    
    pause
    • FYI, the site stylizes your ” and ‘ which breaks your scripts. Was able to correct this and the script works great. I might try and echo out the names of each game…probably not though, lol.

  3. Thank you, I’ve been looking for a solution to Radeon Settings opening *extremely* slowly for years, and AMD’s support is utterly worthless.

    They add profiles for every single Steam/Origin/UPlay title, and this is how they detect them – meaning there are thousands of slow-loading JSON objects read by the Settings app.

    So this solves more than one problem.

  4. That batch file is forbidden, and making my own with the two lines provided results in an error.

    “Steam App”‘) was unexpected at this time.
    C:\Shortcuts>@for /F “delims=” “Steam App”‘) do @reg delete “a” /f

    • The code on the page is for when using these commands directly in a console window. In batch scripts tokens such as %a must appear as %%a and certain characters have to be escaped with ^ this is probably why it’s not working.
      As for the 403 error hopefully I or my host can fix this problem in the next few days. Edit: The problem with download is now resolved. Removed temporary file and link.

  5. @for /F “delims=” %a in (‘reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall ^| findstr /C:”Steam”‘) do @reg delete “%a” /f
    is also useful for deleting Steam itself from the uninstall list for whatever reason.

  6. Many Thanks, helped med clear up 400+ entries from programs and features.
    It really should be built into steam by default to not clutter up the program and features.