Why Did You Give Me This? Steam Can Now Hide Games

Valve released a new Steam client update yesterday. It doesn't add anything big or fancy. It probably doesn't conceal an ARG announcing Half-Life 3. What it does do is fix several small things--small things which have been irritating many for so very long. For starters, that horrible slow embedded web browser has been updated to a newer, faster, and more secure version. Huzzah! And the one Steam feature some people have cried and wept and wailed and cared about more than I will ever understand is here: you can now hide games from your Library list.

You can't entirely delete from your account that copy of Bad Rats (or Secrets of the Magic Crystal, or whatever the gag gift du jour is) given by a 'friend', but you can now shunt it off to a special game prison for naughty games so it doesn't appear in your main list. Or you can simply tidy up a little, clearing away games you know you won't play, as I started when making that picture up there.

It's a fine update filled with many small changes, mostly focused on the Library, Big Picture mode, and In-Home Streaming. Here are a few other small but welcome things from the huge changelog:

• Don't delay content updates for games set to high priority
• Fixed in-game progress indicators for workshop downloads displaying incorrect percentages for compressed files
• Fixed mods and shortcuts not displaying their names correctly in the friends interface and server browser
• Games can now be assigned to more than one category at a time

It also refreshes the UI look a little with some blue text and a new Steam icon that'll surely confuse the heck out of you as you search for that black block in your task bar. It feels weird posting about a Steam client update in the year 2014, but some of these changes have been desired for a decade.