What is “unpacking” on Steam?

Gaming is filled with technical terms, especially if you’re a PC gamer—yes, you are indeed the master race. But for those who might be new to desktop gaming, a term like unpacking can be confusing.

Typically you’d think once you’ve downloaded all of a game’s files they’d instantly be ready to play, but this isn’t always the case. Unpacking is sometimes a necessary task before you can start your gaming engine, but what does it mean?

Before you get too stressed out and pull the trigger on a restart, here’s what you need to know about Steam’s unpacking stage and why it is happening to you.

What does “unpacking” mean on Steam?

Have no fear! Unpacking a game is absolutely normal and something players simply have to deal with if they want the benefits of preloading their favorite upcoming titles.

To stop players from getting into games before they are released the files available to download are encrypted. That way, no one is taking a peek under the hood before it’s ready for delivery. However, because of this, once you are allowed to play Steam is required to decrypt the files in the process called unpacking.

While preloaded titles are the most common case of seeing the unpacking screen they aren’t the only one. Often game updates require some unpacking, but generally, these are much smaller and are completed quicker than entire games. However, that’s sadly not always true.

Of course, I know exactly how frustrating it can feel. You’ve just waited months to play Starfield, pre-downloaded 117GB just to wait even longer for things to be unpacked. It’s annoying trust me, but sadly there’s no way to get around it.

Depending on installation size it could be a short process or something that takes all day. For your sake, we hope it is the former.

Related: Is NVIDIA GeForce worth it?

If you’re seeing the unpacking screen, we urge you to take a deep breath, relax, and maybe kill some time away from your PC before getting in on all of the gaming action.