October 16, 2015 Update: If you’re running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), you’ll need to disable the System Integrity Protection functionality if you want to hide or remove Game Center.
One of the first things I noticed when looking around OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) was the Game Center icon in the Applications folder.
Game Center has been in Mac OS X since 10.8 (Mountain Lion), but the icon recently changed to match the bubbly iOS icon:
I never really use Game Center on iOS and am always annoyed with the spammy friend requests. I’ve turned off Game Center friend requests multiple times, but it always seems to get turned back on.
Once I saw Game Center in Yosemite, I immediately tried to drag the icon to the Trash. No luck:
It took a couple minutes, but I figured out how to remove it. Here’s how your remove Game Center:
Warning! Don’t do this unless you’re comfortable with the command line and have a recent backup of your hard drive. If you don’t know what sudo means, then please don’t proceed. A simple mistake with sudo rm could cause major issues.
– Open Terminal
– Navigate to the Applications folder
– Enter the following:
sudo rm -rf "Game Center.app"
That’s it!
After removing Game Center, I restarted my computer. Game Center didn’t reappear and everything is seems fine. So far. There are probably some ramifications if you try to play Mac App Store games that support Game Center, but I’m not sure. And now I’m wondering if Game Center will reappear then next time I update OS X. Regardless, it’s nice to be rid of that extraneous icon 🙂
Otherwise, I really like Yosemite. It’s really snappy (on a wiped 2012 MacBook Air).
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I had looked up a few months ago how to remove it, just because why have it taking up space when I never used it? I downloaded a game a couple of days ago that could be linked to Game Centre, it had the button for it, that was okay, but just tonight Game Centre kept popping up wanting me to log in, could barely make a move before it was up again. You have saved my sanity (and my growing FreeCell addiction).
Alternate approach – control-click on Game Center and tell it to show package contents. It will reveal a folder full of stuff. You can drag it all to the trash. It will ask for an admin password, but it will do it. Then empty the trash. The annoying icon is still there, but I think it may be disabled because the size is “zero kb”.
Thank you for sharing that method. Did it work for you on El Capitan? When I tried deleting the items I got error messages like this:
“version.plist” can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by OS X.
There is a discussion about this at: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5497151?start=30&tstart=0
Bottom-line is that the ‘gamed’-service is re-installing itself overtime the system is restarted.
These two lines are to be executed after every restart.
You can copy and paste this into the Terminal:
>> sudo defaults write com.apple.gamed Disabled -bool true
Change the “true” to “false” to change it back.
Alternatively you could use the following command;
>> sudo defaults delete com.apple.gamed Disabled
… to remove the setting entirely.
After two day’s of testing, this is surely the way to handle the ‘gamed’-service to stop communicating all the time with the outside world and preventing other services to connect what they need to work.
Next i’ll try is to find a way to run these commands automatically during start-up.
If you as reader know hoot do this, please post. I’ll post my findings when a minimum of two day’s of testing proves it to work.