How to Hide the Games Youre Playing on Steam
- Chris Hoffman
@chrisbhoffman
Steam shares your gameplay activity by default. If youre playingHello Kitty: Island Adventureor Bad Rats, you might want to keep your gameplay a secret. Heres how to hide your Steam activity from your friends.
Hide Played Games From Your Steam Profile
Your Steam profile page normally lists all the games youve been playing and shows how many hours youve spent in all of them, focusing on what youve been playing in the last two weeks.
Steam profiles used to be public by default, but Valve made them private by default. Still, you may have made it public to work with a third-party service that reads information from your Steam profile, like IsThereAnyDeal, which scans your wishlist for games and lets you know if theyre for sale on other game stores.
To access your profile in Steam, hover over your username on the top bar and click Profile.
Click the Edit Profile button at the right side of the page to edit your profile.
Click My Privacy Settings at the right side of your page to find Steams profile privacy options.
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Adjust the privacy settings here to control what people can see. To hide gameplay, you have two options.
To hide gameplay information, set Game details to Private. Not even your friends will be able to see the games youre playing, the games you own, or the games youve wishlisted. They can still see your friends list, inventory, comments, and other information, depending on the options you have selected on this page.
You could also just hide everything bysetting the My Profile option to Private. If you do, no one can see your entire profile page. You can also select Friends Only, and only your Steam friends will be able to see your profile.
Hide Gameplay Activity From Steam Chat
If youre only kind-of embarrassed about the game youre currently playingmaybe you dont care if its listed on your profile page but you dont want all your friends getting a notification that youve started playing the game or see that youre playing it on their friends listyou can go offline or become invisible on Steam chat.
To do so, click the Friends and Chat option in steam, click your username, and select Offline or Invisible. Your friends wont be able to see what youre playing right now, although this information will still appear on your profile page.
Note that setting your Game details to Private will prevent your friends from seeing the games youre playing, even if youre online in Steam chat.
Hide or Remove Games From Your Steam Library
If youd like to hide a game from the Steam library on your PC, you can set it to Hidden or remove it from your Steam library.
People with access to game details on your profile will still be able to see any achievements and playtime you have in that game. However, anyone with access to your PC wont see the game in your normal Steam library.
With Steam now offeringadult-only games and other not-safe-for-work [NSFW] material, the ability to hide games youre playing only becomes more important. But its useful even if youve been playing other games, likeBad Rats, that you dont want anyone else knowing about.
RELATED: How to Hide or Remove a Game From Your Steam Library
Chris Hoffman is Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. He's written about technology for over a decade and was a PCWorld columnist for two years. Chris has written for The New York Times, been interviewed as a technology expert on TV stations like Miami's NBC 6, and had his work covered by news outlets like the BBC. Since 2011, Chris has written over 2,000 articles that have been read nearly one billion times---and that's just here at How-To Geek. Read Full Bio »