Steam It’s the world’s most widely used PC gaming ecosystem, and while it generally works pretty well, it’s not without its issues. One of them is that when you open the application and go to your library of installed games, you only see a black screen and it doesn’t let you interact with any of your games. If it is happening to you right now, don’t worry because we are going to tell you what the solution is.
There are several reasons why Steam can show the black screen in the library (and be careful, only in the library, the rest of the things work fine), such as not having updated the application for a long time, that some configuration is incorrect , problems with the graphics card or simply that you have installed it for so long that the cache is full or has been corrupted. Whatever the cause, you don’t have to worry because we are going to fix it.
What to do if Steam shows the black screen?
The first thing to think about if Steam shows the black screen in the library is that there is a graphics problem, since in the end the Valve application uses its own graphical GUI. For this reason, it is important to make sure that you have your graphics card drivers up to date, and of course after making sure you should restart your PC to ensure that there were no other applications interfering with the Steam interface. After doing these two things (updating graphics drivers and rebooting), it is possible that the problem has been solved.
If this didn’t work and you’re still seeing a black screen in the Steam Library, let’s try other methods to fix it. To get started, do these simple checks:
- Click a few times anywhere in the black area. Sometimes it is removed by doing this and it already lets you function normally.
- If you can see the Friends and Chat section, click on it.
- If you have multiple monitors, try moving the Steam window from one to another.
- If you can access the Steam menu -> Settings, go to the Downloads section and press the “Clear Download Cache” button. Then, in the “Preload shaders” section, try deactivating preloading and clicking OK (later you can reactivate it in the same way).
- Finally, in Steam -> Settings go to Web Browser and hit the “Clear Web Browser Data” button there.
Advanced solutions if nothing works
If none of these potential quick fixes have worked and the Steam Library is still showing a black screen, it’s time to move on to slightly more radical solutions. To begin with, let’s clear steam cache, and for this you must go to the installation folder of the application, normally in c:Program Files (x86)Steam. There you should locate the folder called appcache and directly delete it (make sure Steam is closed before deleting this folder to avoid possible problems).
On the other hand, some users indicate that closing one of the Steam components by force fixes the problem. To do this, access the task manager (from CTRL + ALT + DEL, right-click on Start, or by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + ESC), and in the Details tab, locate the application called SteamWebHelper.exe.
As you can see on our screenshot, many of these processes appear, and what you need to do is to right-click on each of them individually and select End task.
If none of this has worked, it would be advisable to completely uninstall Steam and reinstall it from scratch; It is recommended to do it in a different folder than the one you had it in to make sure that the installation is “clean”.
