Steam does a great job of creating gaming communities and helping you connect with your friends. But sometimes it can be too much and you may want more privacy regarding your Steam activity.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can prevent your friends from checking your gaming activity, how you can hide games from your library, how to make your profile private, among other Steam privacy settings.
1. Hide Steam Games Played
When someone visits your profile, they can see what games you’ve played and for how many hours. Now, if you don’t want your gamer friends to find out about your guilty pleasures, you can hide the games you played from your profile.
- Launch Steam.
- Hover over your username and select Look my profile.
- Click on the Edit profile button.
- select privacy settings.
- Beside game detailsclick Public and set it to Just friends either Private if you don’t want anyone to see your list of played games. Steam will automatically save your new profile settings.
2. Hide Steam games from your library
If you’re sharing your computer with someone else, it might make sense to hide certain games from your Steam library. Maybe they are younger than you and the game content is not appropriate for their age.
Or you’re just embarrassed to play a game and don’t want your family or friends to find out. To hide any game, launch the Steam app and go to your library. There, select the game you want to hide, click the button settings icon and select Manage > Hide this game.
If you want to play the game you have hidden, go to View > Hidden Games. To bring the game back to your library, go to its settings and click Manage > Remove from hidden.
Hiding a game is an easy trick, but it may 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 Game Activity
Steam sends a notification to your friends every time you start playing. Also, they can see what game you’re playing by visiting their Steam friends list. If you want to hide your Steam gaming activity, open the Friends menu and select Disconnected.
If you want to appear offline but still need to use the chat, select Invisible.
In addition to hiding your game activity on Steam, you can customize your game activity status on Steam to confuse your friends.
4. Hide Steam Game Activity for Specific Friends
You can hide your Steam game activity for individual friends if hiding it for all your friends seems like a stretch.
Launch the Steam app and click on friends and chat from the lower right corner. Click on your friend’s name and select Manage > Block All Communications.
Once you block all communication, your friends will see you offline. Also, if they visit your profile, Steam will show your profile as private.
So if you don’t want to arouse suspicion, you should unlock them after a while. Redo the above steps and select Unblock all communications.
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 affect various categories such as game details, friends list, and inventory.
Follow these steps to set your profile to Private:
- Mouse over your username and select Look my profile.
- Click on the Edit profile button.
- In the left pane, open privacy settings.
- Place My profile a Private.
Keep Steam private
Gaming should always be about having fun and a little privacy can help. With the above tips, you can keep private eyes away so that no one can mess up your gaming sessions.
Now that no one can judge you on your gaming taste, you can expand your Steam library without breaking the bank.