Steam Library Manager
A Windows utility for moving and maintaining game libraries, built around one friend’s repeated trips between home and university.
2015–2025·Open source desktop utility·maintenance
Steam Library Manager did not begin with a market or a feature list. A close friend spent much of university away from home, carrying games from his desktop to his laptop before leaving and moving them back when he returned.
Steam’s backup flow made that routine slower and more repetitive than it needed to be. I built SLM around that specific friction: installed games and backups became libraries that could be moved, updated, restored, and managed without rebuilding everything from scratch.
The project grew far beyond that first use case. It added drag-and-drop transfers, open backups, Workshop and mod preservation, compression, cleanup tools, task management, localization, and support for Origin and Uplay.
What began as a tool for one friend became a public open-source project shaped by years of issues, requests, and real use. It grew through more than fifty releases, hundreds of stars, and a decade of maintenance.
SLM is no longer under active feature development. The repository and releases remain available, and I still return when an important compatibility or safety fix needs attention.
- Role: Creator and maintainer
- SLM grew from game transfers into open backups, mod preservation, compression, cleanup, localization, and support for multiple stores.
- The public project has remained available through more than fifty releases and over a decade of fixes.
- I did not begin with a user segment. I began with one friend and a workaround that kept repeating.
- A small personal friction can travel much further once the structure around it becomes useful.
- Once people rely on a tool, maintenance becomes part of the product.
- windows
- open source
- game libraries