Two modern games fill a 500 GB drive, and the caches are extra

Games are the one category where the individual items are genuinely enormous and completely honest about it. A modern title is 80 to 150 GB, which means the arithmetic rather than the cleanup is the problem.

Where it goes on a gaming PC

The setup that works

1. A fast SSD for Windows and the games you are playing this month.
2. A larger drive for the rest, with each launcher configured to install there.
3. Recordings on the second drive too, since Game Bar and OBS default to the system drive.
4. Move rather than reinstall where the launcher supports it, which Steam does.

The moves that do not require redownloading

Steam can move an installed game between library folders without redownloading it, which on a slow connection is the difference between a minute and an evening. Most other launchers reinstall instead, which is worth knowing before you start.

Shader caches and driver updates

Every graphics driver update invalidates compiled shaders, and the old caches are not always cleared. A gaming machine accumulates several gigabytes of them, and clearing after a driver update also fixes a class of stutter, covered in shader caches.

What to uninstall first

Not the biggest game: the one you have not launched in six months. Steam shows last played dates, and the honest answer on most machines is that two or three enormous titles have not been opened since the week they were installed.

# Sort a Steam library by size
Get-ChildItem 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common' -Directory -EA SilentlyContinue |
  ForEach-Object {
    $s = (Get-ChildItem $_.FullName -Recurse -Force -File -EA SilentlyContinue | Measure-Object Length -Sum).Sum
    [PSCustomObject]@{ GB = [math]::Round($s/1GB,1); Game = $_.Name }
  } | Sort-Object GB -Descending