Planned Release Date: November 2026

About This Software

Your games are bigger than they need to be

ShelfSpace compresses installed games with the compression built into Windows, the same engine as compact.exe. Games take less space and keep running exactly as before: no repacking, no mods, nothing to extract before you play.

See the savings before anything is touched

Press Estimate and ShelfSpace samples every game you include with the real algorithm, then shows how much you can free as a low–high range. Games that would gain almost nothing are tagged and left alone. Only then press Compress.

Fast, and it stays compressed

• Compresses with several workers in parallel, with an optional per-drive limit for HDDs
  
• Pause, resume or cancel at any moment
  
• Game updates write files back uncompressed — the optional updates watcher runs from the tray and re-compresses only the changed files once the update has finished
  
• Large files that would not shrink are skipped after a quick trial instead of wasting minutes

Games stay intact

Files are compressed in place by the file system, and games read them normally. We ran Steam's "Verify integrity of game files" after every compress, decompress and cancel in testing, and Steam never had to re-download a file. Any game can be decompressed back to full size at any time.

More than compression

• Finds your Steam libraries automatically; Epic, GOG and any other folder or drive can be added
  
• Cleans up leftovers of uninstalled games and stale shader caches — listed with sizes, nothing selected by default, removal goes to the Recycle Bin
  
• Disk report: what your games take on each drive and how much can still be freed
  
• Four animated themes: Diorama, Cosmos, Liquid and Terminal
  
• 11 languages
  
• No administrator rights, no drivers, no account, no telemetry, no network access

How much will I save?

It depends on the game. In our tests with LZX, Dota Underlords freed 805 MB, Unturned 752 MB and Stumble Guys 599 MB — roughly a quarter to a third of their size — while Brawlhalla, which ships already-compressed data, freed only 22 MB. The estimate tells you which kind each of your games is before you spend any time on it.

Good to know

• Works on NTFS drives (the default for Windows drives).
  
• Games that use DirectStorage on Windows 11 are better left uncompressed — their data is meant to go to the GPU without CPU decompression.
  
• We have not tested every anti-cheat system. Compressed files are byte-for-byte identical when read, but if you are unsure, compress one such game first — you can always undo it.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

The store artwork and some store page text were created with the help of generative AI tools and reviewed and edited by the developer. ShelfSpace itself does not generate any content with AI while it runs.