Recently, a new bug on Steam regarding two games with the exact same name was discovered on the platform’s dedicated subreddit. As reported by Reddit user maciej0s123, there are two games named “Synergy” on Steam, and both of them share the same install directory. What’s more, after the second game is installed, it overwrites the .exe file of the already existing Synergy executable in the folder.
The first Synergy refers to Leikir Studio’s 2025 city management game, while the other one is a free community-made mod for Half-Life 2 which has been online for almost 20 years. As the original poster explained, after installing the 2025 city building sim first, and then the Half-Life 2 mod, “trying to launch the former game will result in the latter attempting to launch.”
But why does this happen in the first place? The most likely cause is that Steam doesn’t secure dedicated installation directories for its games – in other words, there is no guarantee that folder names won’t overlap. While each of Steam’s apps is represented by a unique identification number called App ID (the number you see in Steam games’ URLs), it’s the developers who get to freely decide how the installation folder for their game will be named. Most titles simply use the game’s original name, which rarely causes issues. But in cases when the game names are identical, it seems to be pretty easy for overwriting issues to occur unless the developers themselves don’t take measures to avoid overlaps.
Many platforms like the Microsoft Store, Google Play store and Apple’s App Store assign installation directories based on the IDs of each of the downloaded apps. This means that, even if two or more applications’ names overlap, they will be sent to separate folders based on their identification number. On the other hand, Steam was originally made as a means to distribute and manage games developed on Valve’s Source Engine, so it’s somewhat logical that it wasn’t designed to prevent folder names from overlapping. However, Steam has since grown into a global platform, and with that in mind, it makes sense that revising the system now wouldn’t be realistic. If Valve actually made any changes to the system, there’s a huge potential risk of new problems arising as a consequence.
The original poster seems to have contacted Steam Support about the issue, though they received a rather vague response, with the support agent stating that they cannot provide any information on upcoming or planned fixes. As a temporary fix, many commenters on Reddit suggested manually renaming the folders on PC and changing the installdir values in the steamapps folders after installing the first game. Luckily, there aren’t that many games with overlapping titles existing on Steam right now, though as the platform is steadily expanding its roster of games (especially indie titles), similar issues might end up becoming more apparent.
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