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Entertainment
Steam
Updated Sep 28, 2026
Steam is the games library, and its export is a single JSON file rather than a folder of saves. It covers your whole library, when you bought each item, every play session with its duration, your reviews and your friends list. What it does not include is the games themselves, or your workshop subscriptions in any useful form. It can take weeks to arrive, so request it early.
What you'll get
Game LibraryPlaytime HistoryPurchase HistoryReviewsFriends ListStore Credit
Before you start
- Go to the Steam support site rather than the store account page. The request lives under Help, then Request a copy of your Steam account data.
- Sign in with the Steam account you actually want, not a family member's shared one. People on family accounts download the wrong data and only notice afterwards.
- Only one request can be outstanding at a time. If you have one open already, the button will just say so rather than starting a new one.
How to download
- Submit the request and note the date. This is the number that matters for the rest of the process.
- Wait. A few days is a good result, a few weeks is ordinary.
- You get an email with a link to a ZIP. It contains a single JSON file, and it is a large one.
- Open it with a JSON viewer. A text editor will not survive it on any normal computer.
Pro tip
The wait is genuinely long, up to a month, and it is not something you can hurry. Valve processes these by hand on the back end, so request it a few weeks before you plan to reorganise anything, and then go and do something else.
After the download
- The ExternalLicenses section lists every game you own that came from somewhere other than Steam. These are the ones that disappear if the key is revoked, and they are the only entries in the whole export that are genuinely at risk.
- Purchase history with dates is quietly valuable, because it is the only record of what a subscription cost you across a decade of forgetting to cancel it.
- The playtime breakdown is a record of every game you have played and for how long. It is also an unusually honest portrait of your own behaviour, and you will not enjoy the games that are at five hours.
- Games removed from your library for whatever reason still appear here, with the reason. That is the file to check before you assume something is lost.
- Nothing here restores anything. There is no way to import this back into Steam, and there is no way to recover a deleted game from having a record of it.
- Not sure where to store your export? See our backup guide.