Steam has a number of privacy features that can limit how much players share with each other, but the Steam “Mark as Private” feature can potentially be overlooked, or may confuse some users. Those who prefer not to show everything in their Steam libraries to their friends or don’t want their activity tracked while playing specific titles can use this to do just that.
Arguably one of Steam’s greatest strengths is its friend system, which includes a messaging system that lets players freely chat through text or voice while gaming. The friend list also includes activity tracking, which lets Steam users see when their friends boot up a game. This can be helpful, since it lets players with shared games easily hop into the title together, but not everyone wants to broadcast their activity to their friend list.
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Steam Mark as Private Feature Gives More Nuanced Controls
Players have been able to set their profiles to completely private, and can tell Steam to not inform anyone of what they’re playing. However, that level of privacy can become a nuisance when one actually wants to play games with friends on Steam. The ability to mark individual Steam games as private gives users an extra level of control without having to completely ban their friends from seeing all of their activity, owned games, or achievements across the board.
In Steam, users can mark an individual game as private, which effectively hides it from the entire playerbase, regardless of friend status. To outside viewers, a game in your library that’s marked as private will appear as though you don’t own it at all. The Steam profile page won’t show it under owned games, starting it up won’t appear on the activity feed, and achievements and play time are hidden. Regardless of the user’s reason for wanting privacy, this feature can provide the answer.
How to Private a Game on Steam
There are three main ways to mark a game as private in a Steam library.
- For games that already owned, users can simply navigate to the game in their library, right-click it, navigate to Manage, and then choose Mark as Private.
- Users who have access to the web but not the Steam client can instead navigate to their Steam Community Profile game list on the Steam website and mark it as private from there.
- The feature can also be used to hide new purchases from ever showing up on the user’s profile or account. To do that, users should just select the option to mark a game as private while it’s still in their shopping cart, before completing the purchase.
Steam Private Game Feature Has Some Caveats
While this feature will likely be helpful to a lot of gamers, there are some things to keep in mind regarding using it. Since the feature makes a profile look like any game set to private has never been owned, it’s possible to receive a gift from others of the same game. Gamers also can’t earn Steam Trading Cards while playing any games marked as Private. Additionally, the ability to transfer game files over the local network to download or update a game won’t work so long as the game is marked as private.
Thankfully, multiplayer has been taken into consideration with this feature, and it’s still possible to play with friends who own the same game. If you’ve set a game to private and want to play with a friend, you can still invite them to your game. Doing so will show your activity in the game in a friend’s friend list, but only for that single person. No one else will see that the game is in your library, nor that you’re currently playing anything.
While there are still some Steam features players want that aren’t available yet, this one should be helpful to a lot of users.
