Steam is one of the most popular digital distribution platform that allows anyone with an account to download their favorite PC games. It is currently the largest digital games distributor with over a billion registered accounts and 90 million active users. Although this is a solid performing platform there are instances when certain issues can occur which we will be addressing today. In this latest installment of our troubleshooting series we will show you how to hide Steam game activity from friends.
How To Hide Your Game Activity on Steam
There are several reasons why you will want to hide your game activity from your friends. You might now want your friends to know what game you are currently playing or you don’t want anyone to know what purchases you have made. Listed below are some of the steps you can take to make sure that your activity remains private.
Hide activity from privacy settings
Steam has a privacy setting that allows you to hide your game activity from other players. This method will hide the game activity forever and will not affect any other Steam components present on your account profile.
- Open Steam and go to the ribbon bar at the top.
- Click on your Name and then click on Profile from the newly appeared context menu.
- On the next screen, click on Edit profile (under your current level).
- Inside the Profile Editing options, click on My Privacy Settings from the right-hand side of the screen.
- Once the Privacy Settings come up, scroll to the My Profile entry and click the Public menu associated with Game Details. Then, from the drop-down menu, select Private.
- You can test if the procedure was successful by right-clicking on an empty space in Steam and selecting Copy Page URL. Then, paste the copied URL in any browser and see if your game activity is hidden.
Use free watchable episodes
Some users have discovered that by watching the free watchable episodes on Steam you can hide your game activity. This is not a permanent method and might not work in the future but as of now you can check if it still works.
- Open Steam and click on Store from the ribbon bar at the top.
- On your the Store page of Steam, use the search function in the top-right corner of the screen to search for “Making of Furi”.
- Once you see the Making of Furi listing, click on it.
- From the ‘Making of Fury’ listing, click the Watch button associated with Episode 1
- As soon as you click it, it will open up a small window. What you want to do next is shut it down as soon as possible.
- Repeat step 4 and step 5 with the next two episodes.
- Return to your profile and see how your Recent Activity is completely removed
Set your profile to private
Another method that you can do to hide you game activity is to set your profile to private.
- Open Steam and click on your name from the list of main tabs (under the ribbon bar). From the newly appeared drop-down menu, click on Profile.
- From the profile screen, click on Edit Profile (under your current Steam level
- From the next screen, click on My Privacy Settings from the right-hand side menu
- From the Privacy Settings menu, click on the hyperlink associated with My Profile and change the status to Private. As soon as you do this, the settings will be adjusted automatically (there’s no need to click the Save button or anything like that).
- View your profile and see how your Game activity has been hidden.