Steam Beta now allows marking games "private", which will hide them from other users and your profile

Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzmod to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 359 points –
Steam :: Steam News :: Shopping Cart updates and Private Games
steamcommunity.com
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I always wondered about the people who were playing porn games and just letting that show on their profile. I know most of us look at porn and that's fine, but I do like some privacy. When a dude on my friend's list broadcasts he plays "Toon Tit Tapper" for 12 minutes before signing off, it's a bit of unwanted information.

Many either don't know or don't care. More of the first than the later.

But, well, I used to run a raid guild in WoW and had this one dude where you could clearly hear porn playing in the background whenever he spoke. With him I've always verged on the side of thinking he must've had some sort of fetish for having people hear he was watching porn. Some really peculiar version of exhibitionism.

Did y'all ever mention it to him or was it just a commonly accepted "Oh yeah, that's just 'Background Porn Brad' haha" type thing?

Yeah, people were subtle like saying "can't hear you well, there's other audio coming through". At which point he'd usually turn down the volume, but you could still hear it.

But it was the fact it was persistent, across years.

And, well, he was a great tank, if watching or listening to porn during a raid is what's needed for him to do his job well, I'll let em.

But that doesn't make it any less weird and awkward.

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I spent good money on all those hentai games. I'm not hiding them.

Y'all laugh about the obvious h-game hiding but a friend of mine got bullied for a certain game he bought and played. It's actually kind of useful next time you wanna play a game someone shits on you over.

What non-lewd game would someone get bullied over?

Anime games maybe? Stuff like Hyperdimension Neptunia isn't hentai, but I could definitely see someone getting bullied over it

Yeah, that's one I personally am a little shy to play (did so anyway, they have an interesting mechanic I like).

Bullying might not have been the right word, but the more problematic game was that Harry Potter game, a couple people we knew were pretty against against it at the time cause of J.K. It's water under the bridge now, but I see the desire to maybe not broadcast it.

Regular anime games tbh. If your friends are normies in any way then I could see that happening.

Floras fruit farm which I accidentally left running for 36 hours many many years ago. (Would've enjoyed it much more if one could queue actions, but devs said 'yeah that's not really the focus of our game' which I understand, but it was enjoyable up until it got too micro-managey. I only played it for 2 of those 36 hours.

Yep that's my reasoning too.. I got some games I've always wanted to try, but I know my friends on steam would never let me hear the end of it.

Entire profile set to private These are not the games you are looking for. Move along.

Now I can stay logged in while my idle games go brrrr....

Plural? How many idle games are we talking here?

Usually 3, sometimes 5, other times only 1.

Potatoe Farmer, Cookie clicker, ngu idle, leaf blower simulator, and exponential idle.

Fucking finally! Now when will they let me transfer all the games I had to put on an alt account back to my main?

(Ok really it's just 1 game that I haven't played in ages. I'm not that horny. I just hate having multiple accounts as it eats up headspace)

I can hide some crap that plays my cousin like tabs or goat simulator...

Are they going to create an API so that the private game data can get ingested by every third party data/stats application that I have to unhide and rehide my fucking shit every time bc they're forced to scrape my fucking profile?

You seem annoyed at either possibility here. Which would you prefer?

Because if they let third party scrapers access the private data without user action, it's not private and they may as well not do this at all.

Right now, one must manually allow scraping and make profiles public, to share their data with a third party. If Valve would let developers use an API, this wouldn't be necessary.

Now that they're letting us hide games, the third parties will miss them, while scraping. So this seemed like the right thread to make these comments. Now, a true solution, seems more "necessary," because of this new scenario.

The obvious solution would be to take some token as an argument to the api calls that is private to the user, which would signify a consent to share also the hidden data.

I think there already is a token like this for steam item trading, in case your profile is private?

I.e if you don’t provide that argument, share only public stuff to the caller. If you do, it’s a explicit choice by you, since you are required to provide your credentials in some form of a token.

They're likely talking about using some of the key swapping sites. They only let you join if your profile is public so that you don't get keys for games you already have.

I had a bunch of keys to give away recently and was trying to find ways to do so in ways they wouldn't be botted away (at least not easily), but everywhere to do so either required access to my steam profile or some other process to give them away, so they might just sit with me until they expire.

If you want anyone else to have access to your private game data, why is the game set to private in the first place?

This is a fantastic update. You can public your CSGO and TF2 stats without having to publish any anime games etc that you might have.