Steam Cleaner wipes junk files from Steam, Origin, UPlay, GoG

Steam Cleaner is a portable tool for removing junk game files left behind by Steam, Origin, Uplay and GoG.

The program is as simple as this kind of application can be. It’s a single executable, no installation required, no settings to think about, not even a "Scan" button -- just launch it and within a second or two you’ll see a list of any game leftovers. The developer says Steam Cleaner can clear up "gigabytes" of data in a few seconds. It found more than 100MB of junk on our tiny Steam setup, so this could be plausible.

If you’re happy to wipe the files, click the Clean button, confirm you really, really want to do this, and the data is permanently deleted. That is, gone forever, not sent to the Recycle Bin or anywhere else.

As with all third-party cleanup tools, Steam Cleaner may make mistakes occasionally and delete something important. The release notes for the current build mention a couple of now-resolved issues: "Important Battle.net files being deleted" and "Fixed game files for Penumbra: Overture being removed".

Our own Steam setup was too small to be any serious test, but we tried it anyway. Steam Cleaner found just over 100MB of distributables it thought were safe to delete, and removed them all without having any apparent effect on our Steam apps.

After the test we ran Steam Cleaner again, to see if Steam might have wasted time redownloading the lost files. But no: the program said we had no junk files, just as you’d expect.

Overall Steam Cleaner appears to be a capable product, and is certainly worth a try. But be careful: back up anything important before you use it for the first time, and just until you’re sure it’s trustworthy.

Steam Cleaner is a free application for Windows 7 and later.