asking for a close friend
I have two steam accounts, and I was not able to see anything related to a game marked private from my second account except when family sharing was enabled between the accounts. With family sharing on I could see all private games from my primary account on my secondary (including games which were not installed on the local system).
If you have family sharing on, hold off. Otherwise as far as I know it works as intended.
Family sharing has a family view mode that lets you hide certain games unless you input a password.
It would probably be better if you said the game that you wanted to do this with.
and
Private is subjective. Do you mean as solo play or with friends. Most games have options to cover both instances.
OP is not referring to private lobbies in a game, they are referring to marking a game private on Steam itself, a feature that hides from the world (and your friends) that you own or interact with a game.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-4966
For when you don’t want your friends to know when you’re playing hentai games.
There are some SFW uses too. I use it when I play things my nieces and nephews like, so they don’t flood me with party invites.
Haha… I read it for the articles.
I just play while appearing offline, but that’s a good idea if I don’t want to be appearing offline and I don’t want my playtime to be visible to them lol.
Going to be honest did not know this was a feature.
It was announced a couple weeks ago and is still in beta (see: The Verge)
I’m not sure to the extent in which they are private, but in my testing they DON’T appear in the following places:
- The “Steam Replay” thing.
- Whatever ProtonDB uses to query your owned games.
- Your recent activity (it also doesn’t also doesn’t count your playtime when displaying the “total time play time” in the last 2 weeks).
Not sure if they are hidden in your owned games list on your profile, but I assume they would be.
Note that the count of games you own (which is public) does seem to include hidden games, if that’s a concern.
