Steam offers several built-in privacy and profile settings that let you hide activity details from other users and control who can see your playtime, game library, and online status. Understanding how Steam’s visibility, friend, and profile-level controls interact helps you balance social features with a low-profile experience.
Visibility and Privacy Levels on Steam
Steam provides three profile privacy levels that determine who can see your profile, game library, and general activity:
- Public: Anyone can view your profile, game list, playtime, and current online status.
- Friends Only: Only users on your friends list can see your profile, game library, and playtime.
- Private: Only you can see your profile, game library, and playtime; your online status is hidden to all others.
These settings are central to hiding your activity on Steam, and adjusting them changes whether your play sessions, achievements, and hours are visible to others.
How to Hide Current Game and Activity Status
Steam does not offer a single “hide activity” toggle to make your status invisible to friends without changing your profile privacy. Instead, you control visibility through profile privacy, online status restrictions, and game-specific visibility settings.
Set Profile to Private or Friends Only
Changing your profile to Private hides all game and activity information from non-Steam friends. Friends Only keeps your game library and playtime visible to approved contacts while hiding them from the public and people you are not friends with.
Limit Online Status Visibility
Online status determines who can see that you are currently in Steam. You can choose to show online status to Everyone, Friends Only, or No One. Even when your status is visible, individual games may only appear if your profile privacy allows it.
Hide Specific Games from Your Profile
You can hide individual games from your publicly visible game library. This does not pause your playtime or stop Steam tracking the game, but it removes the title from your visible library.
Step-by-Step: Adjust Key Settings to Hide Activity
Change Profile Privacy Level
- Open Steam and click your Profile Name in the top bar.
- Select Edit Profile from the dropdown.
- Find Privacy Settings and choose Public, Friends Only, or Private.
- Confirm changes to update visibility for your profile and game library.
Adjust Online Status
- Go to Steam > Settings > Social.
- Set Default Privacy for Online Status to Friends Only or No One.
- Save changes to restrict who can see your online presence.
Hide Individual Games
- Open your Game Library in Steam.
- Right-click a game and choose Hide Game from Profile.
- The game will no longer be visible to others based on your profile privacy settings, though playtime may still be tracked locally.