Steam now lets you hide individual games from people's prying eyes

After several months on the Steam beta build, Valve last night officially launched an update which revamps the shopping experience and lets you hide your shame. Two universal conveniences: your shopping basket is now shared across devices, so no losing track of things you meant to buy later; and buying gift copies is now less faffy. More conditional: you can now choose to make individual games private, meaning no one will ever see if you own them or are playing them. I won't ask why you might want to hide any particular games.

"During the beta period we made improvements and fixed bugs – thanks to your feedback!" Valve said in last night's blog post. "DLC for private apps will also default to private, but you can customize that from App Properties in the game's Library Details page. And when you're playing a private app you'll be reminded of your status with a privacy indicator at the top of your Friends List."

I'm most glad to see the shopping basket shared across anywhere you're signed into your Steam account. I have a terrible habit of adding something to my basket on my browser or my phone or laptop, then some distraction happens and... then I realise I forgot because it wasn't in my cart in the Steam client on my desktop and by now the sale ended three weeks ago. Less faffy gifting is good too. You can now buy multiple gift copies (and non-gift copies) in one go, selected when adding them to your basket. Far easier to bomb your pals with Bad Rats.

As for the new privacy features, they have niche uses—but useful uses. You can now either mark a game Private when buying it, or manually set any game Private by going to its entry in your Steam library, right-clicking, then hitting the "Manage" submenu and selecting "Mark as Private". Previously, privacy settings were blanket. You could hide your entire library and make it so no one could see which games you were playing, but maybe you wanted people to know this—most of the time. While I have my own Steam profile locked down as much as possible, I do know some folks get something out of sharing and showcasing all that jazz. And I know that some folks have shames they wish to conceal from the world.

Wags might suggest you will want to hide your vast collection of hentai games but frankly, if that is a potential issue, I assume you've made hentai a large enough part of your personality that you want the world to know. You've probably emblazoned your Steam profile with a max-level trading card badge from one hentai game, and a wallpaper from another which artfully uses the blank space in the middle to hide indescribable eroticisms, and you include at least two horny emojis in every Steam message you send. No, a far more likely shame is that you don't want anyone to know how much you played e.g. The Binding Of Isaac, Balatro, or Destiny 2. 2023 hours of Destiny not counting the Battle.net days, eh? Ha, ha ha, okay Alice. No one can ever know. Take this knowledge to your grave. Certainly don't publish it on a PC gaming website that's been running since 1873.