In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can stop your friends from checking your gameplay activity, how you can hide games from your library, or how to make your profile private, among other Steam privacy settings.
1. Hide Played Steam Games
When someone visits your profile, they can see which games you’ve played and for how many hours. Now, if you don’t want your gamer friends to discover your guilty pleasures, you can hide your played games from your profile.
Launch Steam. Hover the cursor over your username and select View my profile. Click the Edit Profile button. Select Privacy settings. Next to Game details, click Public and set it to Friends Only or Private if you don’t want anyone to see your list of played games. Steam will auto-save your new profile settings.
2. Hide Steam Games From Your Library
If you’re sharing the computer with anyone else, it might make sense to hide certain games from your Steam library. Maybe they’re younger than you and the in-game content is not appropriate for their age.
Or you’re just embarrassed about playing a game, and you don’t want family or friends to discover it. To hide any game, launch the Steam app and head to your library. There, select the game you want to hide, click the Settings icon and select Manage > Hide this game.
If you want to play the game that you’ve hidden, go to View > Hidden games. To bring back the game to your library, access its settings and click Manage > Remove from hidden.
Hiding a game is an easy trick, but it might not be enough to prevent other people from finding it. In this case, you can uninstall a Steam game and reinstall it later.
3. Hide Steam Gameplay Activity
Steam sends a notification to your friends whenever you start playing a game. Also, they can see which game you’re playing if they visit their Steam friends list. If you want to hide your Steam gameplay activity, open the Friends menu and select Offline.
If you want to appear offline but need to keep using the chat, select Invisible.
Besides hiding your Steam gameplay activity, you can customize the in-game activity status on Steam to confuse your friends.
4. Hide Steam Gameplay Activity for Specific Friends
You can hide your Steam gameplay activity for individual friends if hiding it for all of your friends feels like overdoing it.
Launch the Steam app and click Friends & Chat from the bottom-right corner. Click your friend’s name and select Manage > Block All Communication.
Once you block all communication, your friends will see you as offline. Also, if they visit your profile, Steam will show your profile as a private one.
So, if you don’t want to raise suspicions, you should unblock them after a while. Go through the above steps again and select Unblock All Communication.
5. Make Your Steam Profile Private
If you don’t want to manage multiple settings on your Steam account, you can choose the nuclear option and set your profile to Private. This will block any form of communication with your friends and will influence multiple categories such as Game details, Friends List, and Inventory.
Follow these steps to set your profile to Private:
Hover the mouse over your username and select View my profile. Click the Edit profile button. From the left pane, open Privacy Settings. Set My profile to Private.
Keep Steam Private
Playing games should always be about having fun and a little privacy might help. With the above tips, you can keep privy eyes away so no one can spoil your gaming sessions.
Now that no one can judge you for your taste in video games, you can expand your Steam library without breaking the bank.
