Will deleting games free up more space on my hard drive?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #16, I talk about the amount of space taken up by games and look at some options for effectively cleaning a hard drive.

Deleting games?

Certainly. Deleting games will definitely clear up some space.

Deleting it, obviously, from your Recycle Bin will make sure that deleted
space is recovered for other programs to use. It will actually show up as free
space.

The reason I hesitate on this question at all is because games is a very
vague term. Some games don’t use much space, others do. I know that World of
Warcraft, for example, is probably the program responsible for the largest
amount of disk usage on the primary drive on my desktop machine.

So, absolutely, if I were to uninstall my World of Warcraft, I would recover
a lot of free space.

Analyze your disk space

My recommendation instead is that: rather than assuming that the games are
taking all this space, use a program called TreeSize. It’s in an article,
“Where’s my disk
space going?“

That will allow you to see exactly what’s using up the most disk space on
your machine, on your hard drive.

What that will allow you to do is:

A) Determine if that particular game is actually guilty and if uninstalling
it would have some substantial benefit.

B) More often than not, it will allow you to identify other low-hanging
fruit – other things that are easier to delete or just more effective to delete
in terms of recovering disk space.

So, that’s the direction I would head you off: “Where’s my disk space
going?“

• Start by analyzing what’s taking up all the disk space;
• Consider using a tool like CCleaner to clean up some things that can be
  deleted without concern;
• And then maybe, identify one or more of the games on your machine as being
  candidates for deletion to free up some disk space.