Valve is Testing Private Games on Steam; Hide Inconvenient Titles From Your Friends
Steam finally lets you test a feature that will help you hide embarrassing games from your library from your friends.
Valve has released a new beta version of the Steam client. It's not a major update, but with it users get access to a new feature: the option to hide selected games from their library from their friends.
We first received information about this novelty back in early November, albeit only in the form of code fragments in Steam's database. In addition, until now the platform enables us to hide details of all games (but not the games themselves) from other users or a selected item in the library list (but only locally on a selected device).
The new option enables you to hide individual titles from Internet users by marking them as "private." This includes "game ownership information, game status, game play time and activity in that game.". This enables us to hide inconvenient titles from friends without blocking them from joining our sessions in other games.
The feature has been discussed in detail by Valve along with another new feature available as part of Steam beta: a modified version of the platform's shopping cart, which was also previously reported by Pavel Djundik (creator of SteamDB). The latter enables you to mark a game as private immediately upon purchase (while you can also do it in the library).
In addition, the new shopping cart enables you to purchase a game for multiple people at once (i.e. yourself and a friend as a gift) and is synchronized across all the devices on which you are logged in.
We don't know when these features will make their way to all Steam users. Valve also failed to mention advanced parental control options, which Djundik also wrote about in November. The latter also added information on options for recording game clips, although for now we don't have much information about it (via X / Twitter).
