Valorant: Can't Change Install Path? (FIXED)

There are many reasons players might want to change their installation paths of games. Maybe the one hard drive is about to run out of space, or maybe the current installation path has certain restrictions. Regardless of the reason, most games make changing the install path super easy, however, doing it for Valorant can be a little tricky, especially because of the Riot client.

Changing the install path for your Valorant is anything but straight forward, but we’ll do out best to ensure you’re able to do it. However, if you aren’t able to do so, you might have to check some things. Naturally, the first thing is to ensure the place you’re trying to install it on has enough space. If that doesn’t work, try uninstalling and then reinstalling the Riot client, but this time ensure the install path is set to where you want it to be.

If you've been having trouble changing the install path of Valorant then worry not because we're about to go through every fix for it.

How to Change Valorant Install Path 

Before we go through potential fixes, let us go through the normal way of changing the install path for Valorant.

To change the Valorant installation path you have to:

1. First off, look for the folder where you originally installed Valorant. (Usually inside the Riot Games folder)
2. Now, you want to look at the total size of the Valorant folder and compare it to the new path you want to install it to in order to ensure you have enough space for Valorant. If you don't, then we recommend you delete some unnecessary files.
3. With that done, you want to select the entire Valorant folder (in addition to the Riot Client folder) and copy it. 
4. Once copied, you can go ahead and paste it to the new location. Remember to delete the older files after pasting them to the new file location in case something goes wrong. Why keep around unnecessary folders, right?
5. Now, you want to go to the C: drive and navigate to the Program Data folder. Inside this folder, look for the Riot Games folder, open it, and search for the “RiotClientInstalls.json” file. 
6. To edit it, right click the file and click “Open with” then open it with Notepad. Here you will see that the file still displays the old installation path of the game instead of the one you just transferred it to. 
7. Yup, you guessed it right. Change the installation path from the original to the current location that the game is on now, then save the file. The installation paths should look like: “C:\Program Files\Riot Games\Valorant” (just with the new one).
8. Now, in the same Riot Games folder, you want to open the Metadata folder, and then open the folder named “valorant.live”. In this folder, find the “valorant.live.product_settings.yaml” file and open it with Notepad just like you did with the other file.
9. In this file, change the “product_install_full_path” and the “product_install_root” lines to reflect the current destination location of the game, just like before.

Yeah, this was a little bit of a long process, but you should be able to launch Valorant now. Riot seems to like making otherwise easy things unnecessarily complicated. Just look at how hard it is to gift the battle pass in Valorant or hide chat in Valorant. 

Can’t Change Install Path

So, you followed the above mentioned steps but you still aren’t able to run Valorant? Well, we have a couple of things you should try then.

#1: Ensure the Code Is Correct

The most common reason for players not being able to run Valorant after changing the install path is they don’t copy the code correctly. Therefore, we recommend you go back to the above steps and just go through them one more time. It might be a good idea to copy and paste the text directly from here when applicable.

#2: Confirm the New Place Has Enough Space

If you transferred the save file to a completely different drive, then it’s possible that it didn’t have enough space for all the Valorant files, and therefore, the install path change was incomplete. To ensure this doesn’t happen, we recommend you keep around a GB worth of extra space just in case.

#3: Run Valorant as Admin

Sometimes, running Valorant as an administrator also helps when you change the installation path. To do so, simply right click on the Valorant icon on the desktop and select “run as administrator”. Alternatively, you can also type Valorant after clicking the Windows key and clicking on the run as administrator option from there.

#4: Uninstall and Reinstall

If nothing this far has worked, then the last thing you can do if you want to change the install path is to uninstall and reinstall the game and client. Of course, it’s much MUCH easier to do this than to change the install path, and if you have fast enough internet, we actually recommend you do this from the get go.