How do I find the ID for a game on Steam?

There is an answer for this in the Steam Support, however, it requires you to be running both Steam and Windows.

Taken from Steam Support: Finding the Application ID for a Steam Game:

This process can also be used for Demos, Media, and other products on Steam:

1. Login to the Steam account
2. Go to your Library
3. Right click the installed game and choose "Create desktop shortcut"
4. Go to your Desktop and locate the new shortcut
5. Right-click on the shortcut and select Properties
6. Look at the target path for the number following steam://rungameid/. This number is the Application ID for the game.

Many of the methods above work but I am going to show you an offline version. I am using Windows and uncertain if it works with other systems. If you head into your Steam directory and open SteamApps, and then open common. There you will find a list of games. Open your chosen folder and find "steam_appid". Open it, and it will show the ID in a text document.

None of the above worked (at least easily),

(Just to be clear this works in Ubuntu Linux's Desktop)

One way from another post I read, ... is to make a shortcut on the desktop, and R. Click IT'S properties, and it is in the end of the "Commands:" Line One WILL find the AppID (rungameid).

ex's. (in my Shortcut)

#

Name: The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim.desktop

Command: steam steam://rungameid/72850

#

Therefore Elder Scrolls ... appid is 72850

Always trying to Help, Mark

While 3ventic's answer is the easiest way, there is a way to do it which is fully offline and more garunteed than Waddling Pig's answer (as not all games have that steam_appid file) however this will only work for games you have downloaded as this method has you look in the steamapps folder.

in the steamapps folder you'll see a bunch of appmanifest_######.acf files, the # are the app id for the game, but also other information such as where the game's directory is and it's name. using Notepad++

1. Open the "Find in Files" dialog with CtrlShiftF
2. in "Find What" enter the name of the game
3. in "Filter" put in *.acf
4. in "Directory" put in the path to the steampps folder
5. untick "In all Sub folders"
6. Click "Find in Files"

and quickly you should get a result with the highlighted line of the file being the game name, verify this and look at the filename of the .acf file and the number in the name is your id. you can use any other program you are familiar with if it can

• search for text in files in a specified directory
• can be filtered to only look at .acf files and/or just the steamapps directory (as it can slow right down if your also searching every file in the common directory which is where the games are normally downloaded too)

this method also has the extra benefit in that if you are looking for where the game files are, the .acf file will have that listed in there too (i have came across the rare instances where game folders in common aren't intuitive to the game they actually are)

A list of all your installed steam apps and their appID's can be obtained easily with one line of BASH offline using grep, sed and awk to look at the appmanifest files in Steam/steamapps/(on Linux/Unix)

your path to /steamapps/ may vary if you install your games to a non default place.

grep -n "name" ~/Steam/steamapps/*.acf | sed -e 's/^.*_//;s/.acf:.:/ /;s/name//;s/"//g;s/t//g;s/ /-/' | awk -F"-" '{printf "%-40s %sn", $2, $1}' | sort

Breakdown of what that one line of bash does:

1. grep for lines containing "name" in all the .acf files in steamapps/ the lines it returns are the filepath/name of the .acf with the appID in them followed by our mathed grep pattern "name" and the name of the application.
2. sed to strip the line up to and including the "_" (leaving the appid), replace the tabs with a single space, remove the double quotes, remove the word "name", replace the first space after the id number with a "-" (a character that is not found in any game names)
3. awk with "-" set as the delimiter to print the columns formatted with the name of the game followed by the ID number
4. sort to alphabetize

If you're using Windows, you can try using this Batch Script to get your Run Game ID. It takes files from %appdata% start menu folder, duplicates, and changes the file extension from ".URL" to ".TXT" Then it read out the output and filter it.

@echo off

REM Set up the Variable
set GameName=Beat Saber
set TempFile=TempFile

REM Prepare for trouble, and make it double
copy "%appdata%MicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsSteam%GameName%.url" "%TEMP%%TempFile%.txt" 
pushd %TEMP%


REM did it work? 
IF EXIST "%TempFile%.txt" (
echo Temp file is created!
) ELSE (
echo Uh Oh Stinky!
)

REM read the Temp file and filter the output
FOR /F "tokens=* USEBACKQ" %%F IN (`findstr /I "rungameid" .%TempFile%.txt`) DO (
SET num=%%F
)
set id=%num:~22,28%  

REM did it work?
Echo Your Run Game Id is %id%   

REM Lets commit Gammer Moment
start steam://rungameid/%id%

REM clean up the mess
del /f %TempFile%.txt

REM is it clean yet?
IF EXIST "%TempFile%.txt" (
echo Temp File exists
) ELSE (
echo Temp File is no more
)

REM enable for debugging
pause

This answer is another solution that works on Linux (Ubuntu in this case) inspired by the answer by @Slobeck above.

$ find ~/Games/steam/steamapps/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.acf' -exec awk -F '"' '/"appid|name/{ printf $4 "|" } END { print "" }' {} ; | column -t -s '|' | sort -k 2
285820   Action Henk
290340   Armello
622020   ATV Drift & Tricks
308040   Back to Bed
637090   BATTLETECH
376770   Big Thinkers 1st Grade
376760   Big Thinkers Kindergarten
49520    Borderlands 2
261640   Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Substitute the path to your steamapps directory as appropriate, if you don't know where it is you can run this command to find it:

$ find ~ -type d | grep steamapps

I would be interested to know if this would work on Windows 10 with Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Steamdb is the best third party resource providing information about steam. It has a huge amount of information available. In order to find a appid using steamdb load the site and enter the game name in the search box and hit enter.

The returned results provide a list of games including the appid. You can click on the appropriate appid to visit the page for that game. Another handy feature is if you have the appid you can enter it in the search box and it will automatically load the page for that game.

Here is an example using Sokobond (appid 290260)