Steam will soon let players mark a game as ‘private’ so friends can’t tell they played it

Steam is reportedly adding the ability to mark individual games in a library as ‘private’.

SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik showed a screenshot of the feature on X (formerly Twitter), suggesting it’s currently in the works.

At the moment, if players have a game in their library that they may not want others to know about, they can choose to hide it from their library. All this does, however, is stop others seeing it in their list of games.

Once a player starts playing that game, their achievements and playtime for that will still be visible to others.

As such, at the moment the only way a player can truly ensure nobody knows they play a certain game is to set their entire Steam library, play activity and achievements to private.

The new feature will let players choose a specific game and select a “Mark as Private” option on its drop-down menu.

This will keep the game visible in their library and their list of played games when they’re logged in and looking at them, but will hide it from the public-facing version of these lists, meaning other people won’t know the game is that player’s library.

The reaction to Djundik’s tweet largely jumped to one of the more obvious use cases for this new feature, the ability for players to stop people knowing that they play games with questionable content.

“It’s pretty obvious this will be used to hide their hentai games”, said user @CedrinMedia, while user @Clbull118 added: “Porn games sales [are] about to go through the roof.”

Somewhat more innocently (hopefully), user @Bearspacegoat replied: “Finally I can play Hello Kitty Online Island Adventures without shame.”