How to install a Steam skin on Windows 10
The Steam client is hardly the most aesthetically pleasing app in any sense of the word. It’s slow to start and navigation isn’t the greatest. You can’t really speed it up but you can take some of the ugliness out of it if you install a Steam skin. Here’s how.
Find Steam Skins
Skins for Steam are like themes for Windows 10 or skins for Minecraft. There’s no one place where you can find them all. There are lots of different places where you can find Steam skins. A good, well-built Steam skin has quite a few files and folders in it so it will download as a zip file. It is up to you to find something that looks nice. For this article, we’re going with the popular Metro for Steam skin.
Install a Steam skin
Download the skin you want to install and extract it. Once extracted, it’s a good idea to look at the name of folder that the skin extracted to. This name will dictate the name the skin will appear with in Steam’s settings. If it’s not user-friendly, change it to whatever you like.
Once extracted, you need to paste the folder inside the Skins folder in Steam. A lot of people install Steam to their Windows drive which is usually the C drive while others choose to install it to one of the other drives on their system. Locate the Steam folder on your PC and open it. Inside, you’ll find a folder called ‘Skins’. Open it.
If you’ve never installed a Steam skin, this folder will be empty save for a text file. Paste the extracted skin folder here. Paste the entire folder into the Skins folder instead of copying the files from it.
Open Steam and go to the Steam menu. Select Settings. On the Settings window, select the Interface tab and open the dropdown under ‘Select the skin you wish Steam to use’. Select the skin you just added to the Skins folder and restart Steam when you’re prompted to.
When Steam relaunches, it will be with the new skin.
I mentioned earlier that a good Steam skin will have quite a few files and folders. If you install a skin and there are some parts of the Steam client that are still using the old UI, or something doesn’t look right, it is possible that the developer of the skin hasn’t modified that particular part of the Steam UI. You can try using a different skin, or see if you can make do with the one you have if it isn’t missing anything too critical.
