How to hide embarrassing Steam games from your friends

Steam has slowly become the Wild West where you can buy questionable games. However, doing so increases the risk of your colleagues and friends finding out. It used to be that you couldn’t hide your games from your friends and everyone could see you playing that (ahem!) anime game. But Steam knows our pain. As part of its continued efforts, Steam has finally added an option to hide suspicious game purchases from others. Here’s how:

Once this feature rolls out in the latest Steam client beta update, you can go buy this month’s embarrassing game and enjoy some private time. You can keep these games private and easily hide them from the public eye.

Games marked as private won’t show up in your friends’ activities or anywhere else. Even if you’re playing a game online, it won’t show up in your current game activity.

At the time of writing, this feature is only live on the beta branch, so you’ll need to switch to the same beta branch to try it out. To do this, go to Steam Beta Updates under Steam Settings -> Interface -> Client Participation. Next, you’ll need to sign up for the Steam Beta. Client version is 1703100617 and build date is December 21, 2023.

Method 1: Hide Steam games during purchase

First, we’ll show you how to make your game private right away when you purchase it. This reduces embarrassment by allowing you to secretly purchase games in the Friend Activity tab without anyone knowing. To do this, follow these steps:

• Let’s say you want to buy a game on Steam. In this example, we selected Loretta .
• When you click ” Add to Cart ” on the game page, “Added to Cart!” will be displayed. Pop-up screen.

• In this pop-up window, click on the dropdown below the game name to find the option to make your game private.
• It will be hidden by default when you complete the purchase by selecting the “For my account: Private” option .

Doing so will prevent your game from appearing as a purchased item in your Steam Community Activity. Additionally, when you play the game, or if someone else tries to buy the same game, it won’t appear in the “Friends Who Own” section.

After following the steps, your game will be private and no longer visible anywhere. It will also no longer appear in your personal Steam deck. I bought the title to test it out, but it didn’t show up in my friend’s activity tab.

Method 2: Hide Steam games from your library

The second method is for gamers who already have some questionable games in their library. Here we will show you how to mark an existing game as private and hide it from your friends. Follow the steps below to see how it works.

• Find the game you want to hide and right-click to display a drop-down menu.
• Click Manage in the drop-down menu and select Mark as private .

In addition to hiding embarrassing game choices, this could also be a useful feature for those reviewing games under embargo or for players looking to have their own naughty time.

Finally, if you feel like you have no interest and want to show off your gaming selection, you can follow the steps above and select the ” Unmark as private ” option.

Let us know what you think about this new Steam feature in the comments section below. Also, can you tell me which games will be immediately hidden with this feature? As for me, I’m going to go buy some games that I couldn’t buy before.