Video Games

Steam will allow players to hide games from their friends

You won’t need a second account for your more exotic tastes anymore

Marco Wutz

Steam will allow players to hide games from their friends
Steam will allow players to hide games from their friends /

Update (Dec. 21, 2023): There we have it – Steam has today implemented a feature that allows players to hide their games from being seen by anyone other than themselves. Users can mark games as private directly when purchasing them or do so retroactively from their library (navigating to "game page," "settings," and "manage"). That means you can go wild in the upcoming Winter Sale without being judged by your friends.

Original (Nov. 8, 2023): It looks like Steam, the most important digital sales platform for PC games, is working on a new feature that will allow users to hide games from their friends, according to the creator of SteamDB. Currently, players can easily check which titles people on their friend list own, even if they mark themselves as online while playing them. This new feature will allow players to completely hide their ownership of a game.

This is going to be very convenient for those with more… exotic tastes in video games, who may be a little embarrassed to let their friends know about their preferences.

While games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 have raunchy moments, they are rather tame compared to some of the other things you can purchase on Steam. Worse, you could get caught playing Overwatch 2 on Steam and your entire reputation could go down the drain.

While having a second account for stuff like this isn’t a huge hassle, it’s still a hassle – and so this new feature, which seems to be in testing at the moment, is going to make life easier for a subset of the gaming community. Convenience is king, after all.

We don’t know when this feature will be widely rolled out on the platform, but it’s coming.

Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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