How to Hide Steam Games

Hiding games in your Steam library is a rather useful trick. If you don’t want your friends to see all your favourite unhinged games, we’re here to save the day and show you how to hide your games on Steam.

We know you’re in a rush to hide all your hours spent on Doomsday Paradise, so we won’t carry on waffling. Let’s jump straight to it instead.

Can I Hide Games in My Steam Library?

Let’s face it, we’ve all got some rather embarrassing games in our online libraries… These games might have been gifted from that one friend or are a testament to your hidden love of dating sims or unhinged gameplay. Whatever the case, you can easily hide all the games that you don’t want anyone else to see with a click of a button.

What Does It Mean to Mark a Game as Private on Steam?

When you mark a game as private in your Steam library, your ownership, in-game status, playtime, and activity will all be hidden. You can relax for your friends won’t be able to see all those countless hours spent playing Hatoful Boyfriend or Dream Daddy.

If a game is marked as private in your Steam library, it will:

No longer appear on your Steam Community profile or in your recently played game activity.
Your status in your Friends List will not automatically change to ‘In Game’ when playing a hidden title.
Your activity in the game, such as achievements, will not appear in the Activity feed.
If one of your Friends is browsing the Steam Store, you won’t appear in the list of ‘Friends who own this game’.
If that friend tries to gift you the game, it won’t show as already owned.
Any showcases on your Steam Community profile won’t include the game or any achievements.
If a game is marked private, you’ll not receive any Steam Trading Cards.
If you’ve altered the ‘Game File Transfer over Local Network’ setting to allow others on the same network to download games, they won’t be able to for any that are marked as private.

Does Hiding Games Impact Multiplayer?

Having a game marked as private can impact any multiplayer game modes.

If the game has Steam matchmaking, your Steam ID will be visible to any other players in the same server. If you choose to invite a friend to a private game, that friend will be able to see your in-game status until you either exit the game or disconnect from Steam. This allows them to join the game.

How to Hide Games

Marking games as private is quick and easy. There are three different ways you can do this:

From the Steam Client: Go into the ‘Manage’ subsection found on the game page. You can find this by right clicking on a game or the gear icon on the game page. Alternatively, go into the ‘Privacy’ settings in game properties.
From your web browser: On any web browser you can go onto your Steam Community Profile games list and mark which titles you want to be private.
From your shopping cart: Before you successfully purchase a new game, you can opt to mark it as private on the shopping cart page.

Upgrade Your Gaming Set-Up

Looking for even more new game releases to play and hide on your Steam library? If your PC isn’t quite up to the task of running all the latest AAA titles, you can find your next upgrade at Overclockers UK.

We’ve picked out our top selection below, but if this PC doesn’t suit your vibe or favourite games, you can shop the full select by clicking the button.

Shop PC Systems

Refract Gaming Jade Pre Built PC

Pre built gaming PC
Designed for mid-tier gaming and budding content creators
AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU and NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti
32GB DDR5 RAM
1TB M.2 SSD

Buy Now

Do You Have Any Games Hidden on Steam?

We’re all friends here. You can tell us if you have any games hidden from your friends on Steam. We pinky promise we won’t tell.

*Prices correct at time of writing and PC specs are subject to change.