A new update for Steam brings a few handy new features out of beta and into the public branch, including the ability for gamers to mark certain games and applications as private. Considering the extremely wide variety of games and genres out there, it's no surprise that there are some games that Steam users would rather keep their ownership of to themselves, for a number of reasons.

Being the colossal PC gaming hub that it is, Steam seemingly never stops being updated, with a handful of long-anticipated features kept exclusive to beta participants until very recently. The prospect of having full control over in-depth privacy settings for specific games is one that has been around for decades, and it has only become more relevant over the years as certain subcategories of games have grown more popular. While a particular few of the features added with Steam's latest update, both privacy-related and not, have been on the gaming community's collective wishlist for a long while now, they've only just become a reality for Steam users.

The latest update for Steam finally makes it possible to mark specific titles as private, preventing any other Steam users from viewing the ownership of selected titles while also keeping them oblivious of details such as recent activity, in-game status, amount of time played, and more. Users can directly mark applications that they already own as private by right-clicking them, navigating to the "manage" option, and selecting "mark as private." Games can also be marked as private prior to purchasing them so that details regarding a recently acquired application won't be available to Steam friends. On top of privacy options, though, Steam users are now able to easily send gifts to multiple users simultaneously, and access their store cart universally from any device.

Some Steam users will no doubt feel more comfortable playing certain games thanks to the addition of these settings, and they may also prove even more useful than they seem. Players far ahead in newly-released games can keep their in-game activity and Steam achievements hidden to potentially prevent others from seeing spoilers, and introverted players can hide their activity in multiplayer games to avoid receiving dozens of invitations from friends when they just want to play alone for an hour or two.

Whatever the case, new Steam features will undoubtedly be useful to all kinds of players. It may also inspire other gaming platforms to implement similar features into their services in the future, and wouldn't mark the first time that Steam has influenced the addition of mechanics to other competing services and launchers.

Posted: Mar 10, 2024 3:22 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://gamerant.com/steam-update-privacy-feature/