How to change steam skin? Can you even change Steam’s default look and feel? It is surprising that many people still don’t even know that they can change the way their Steam app looks.
Steam skins are a quick and easy way to change the look of the Steam app. You can go from a boring grey layout to a completely different layout with either very vibrant/flashy colors or some plain and soothing colors. It’s up to you to decide the final layout, you can either set or create your perfect skin or you can also set a different skin depending on your mood or the game you are playing. Well now let me show you the methods by which you can change your steam skin.
How to Install Steam Skins
Method 1:
From Steam Settings
This is the easiest way to change steam skin.
Step 1. The first Step is to get yourself some skins that you can apply on Steam, now for this first method, the list of websites from where you can download suitable skins for your Steam app is given at the end of this section.
Step 2. Next, browse your computer and find the Steam installation folder, it’s usually located in ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam‘. after that click on ‘skins‘ folder which is in that directory.
Step 3. Copy your downloaded folder (or extracted zip file) and paste it in ‘skins’ folder inside your Steam installation directory.
Note: after you put your skins in the steam skins folder, make sure to restart the steam client for the skins to appear in the menu.
Step 4. Open steam and navigate to Steam>Settings>Interface. Once here, under the ‘Select the skin you wish Steam to use tab’ label, click on the select box and choose your skin.
If your skin is not showing then you might have downloaded wrong files for the above method or your downloaded file is still archived (is in .zip, .rar, .7z format) and you need to extract it.
Once done, you will be asked to restart Steam and after the restart, your selected skin should be applied.
One thing to note is that you need to select skins/themes which are compatible with the current version of Steam. After the recent Steam Chat update, Steam’s interface has changed a little so some themes might not work properly.
Links for Steam skins:
https://gamebanana.com/guis/games/6
Method 2
Using Steam Customizer
This second method of changing steam skins involve downloading and installing a 3rd party program, don’t worry it is completely safe to use. The name of this program is Steam Customizer, the link will be in the bottom of this section.
Step 1. Installing and running the program.
Step 2. On the start screen of the app, you can see a few skins that you may have installed using the previous method. This app uses .stskins files which you can download from links below. Once the file is downloaded and you are inside the app go to File>Open once the dialog box opens, locate and select your .stskins file.
Step 3. After doing so, the application should close and the theme wll be installed, launch Steam to verify the same. If Steam was running before you applied the skin, you need to restart it. For some reasons, if you didn’t like the skins they have or you would like to customize Steam in your own way, you can do so by creating your own skin in their editor section on their website.
Not all the skins would be fully compatible with the latest version of Steam but the skins here gets updated very frequently and you can easily edit any skin available on their website.
(Important: The latest Steam Library Update (October 31, 2019) has broke many of the existing themes & skins for the previous client versions, so chances are that the existing skins will no longer work for you. I will update the post once new skins become available.)
Links for-
Steam Customizer: click here.
Skin files (.stskins): click here.
.stskins creator/editor: click here.
Some skins that I like:
Metro, Nepko(.stskins), House Stark(.stskins), Euphoria UK v4(.stskins) & Green Motif(.stskins).
If anything goes wrong like you installed a corrupted/bad skin file or the colors are too bright or it simply made you unable to use the Steam app, you can easily undo these changes by deleting skin files from ‘skins’ folder in your Steam installation directory or by using the Steam Customizer app to delete the skin files (it can even delete the skins/themes which are on Steam directory) .
can you do one for mac? I want to do this but you only did it on windows.