steam steamworks common redistributables

However, it’s not practical to do so and has a lot more cons than pros. In short, if you’re willing to risk your games not launching or running as intended or having to install the required files manually, you can delete the Common Redistributables. Now that you know more about the Common Redistributables package on Steam, the next question is whether you should delete these files or keep them on your PC. Steamworks Common Redistributables – Should I Keep Them Installed? There’s no charge for these as they’re included with your game purchase. Every game installed used to download their own copy of every redistributable it needed, but a while back Valve moved to a single shared install folder for them. This is a collection of extra software libraries/drivers you need for a given game to run correctly. Here’s how a Reddit user explained the Common Redistributables in a user-friendly way:

This is where things become slightly more technical, and as a regular Steam user, you don’t have to know all this, but if you’re curious, here’s the official Steam document explaining the install scripts. Steam uses so-called install scripts to install these redistributables on your system. If you are interested in the complete list of redistributables, you can view it here. NET Framework, DirectX 9, OpenAL, XNA, and PhysX. These shared components are also referred to as Common Redistributables, as stated in this official Steam article.

Well, the average user doesn’t know this, and they shouldn’t, since their only interest is in playing the game and not what’s going on behind the scenes, but games require shared components to be installed on your machine before they can successfully start and run. Steamworks Common Redistributables And Their UsecaseĮvery Steam user would agree that downloading, installing, and running a game through their client is easy as one-two, which is quite impressive, but why is that so?

Steam steamworks common redistributables