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so as to not show up in searches...(cough) but mostly loved ones. sometimes you like a series of games but you don't want to see a spastic title like halo wars, or you don't want your gf/bf to see it like halo wars.
I've seen a lot of threads about this and this is the general response from most forum users it seems, but I think it stems from the fact that people don't realise that platforms like Steam (or any platform that involve socialisation) are becoming more and more intertwined with our real lives and thus, need greater privacy controls.
Steam is not just an anonymous gaming platform any more than instagram is anonymous photo sharing platform or tiktok is an anonymous video-sharing platform. The days of anonymous gaming and yelling down the mic at randoms on Halo are a thing of the past; your profile is often linked to other social media/services or linked to purchases, interests, etc. People who work in offices together will join each other for games over Discord and through Steam. Adding someone on Steam is more akin to adding someone on Facebook these days, "oh you play *this* game, cool! I'll add you on Steam, we can play together" - "Oh... um... uh, sure... but I have to keep my profile private because as much as I want to socialise with you, Steam only has like 2 preset levels of privacy which is basically you see all or you see nothing..."
As for the antisocial people being like "just don't hide it, 4head", I liken it to something like having sex toys in your bedroom drawer. I'm not ashamed to have them, but I also don't exactly leave them on the coffee table when people come over. I don't exactly want to talk about it with my coworkers, even though I wouldn't be ashamed of it either. You don't have to be an obnoxiously hostile and confrontational person about everything in life like that; you can be confident and enjoy your own interests and hobbies without wanting it to be on display for everyone either.
I would like to have greater control over my profile and what I wish to display, and I don't think that harms anyone else if I want to hide certain games. This doesn't even just mean adult games; maybe I just don't want people to know that I have 2000 hours on The Sims 3, which I think is completely fine for me to want to keep to myself without having to lockdown my entire profile with maximum security in order to omit that.
I find it a little bizarre people are SO actively against having more control over your privacy and security. I remember when Overwatch brought it the ability to hide your profile and people went insane about it; or at least, the toxic people who could no longer flame mercy/torb/whatever mains did. Power to the people, I say. Let people decide what they do and don't want to have on their profile and give them full control. There's literally no logical reason to be against giving the user more control, I find it absurd that a vocal minority of users are AGAINST having more control, it's genuinely baffling.
No, that is shifting the onus of your buying habits on to another.
FREE POINTS - THANK YOU.
It's not like Steam supports you moving them to a new account; you'd need to rebuy everything (that's a lot games for most people), and besides achievements/playtime are permanent, you can't remove them even if you permanently remove the game from your inventory. I've seen complaints about this for other reasons, such as people playing an achievement baiting game (with 5000+ achievements) and then wanting to remove the 1/5000 from their account, but being forced to now have a subpar achievement percentage, for example.
There are a lot of things that giving the user more control would help with, not just for adult games but just in general for displaying your profile as you desire it to be.
It's not a question of "choosing your friends", it's a question of privacy. It's dumb. Please, please, please, Steam. I beg of you. I want a "my activity settings" panel just like the "friend activity settings" panel, with the exact same boxes to tick or untick. I also want, additionally, in said activity settings panels, the possibility for video games to not appear in activity feed.
PLEASE
As a store, visibility is a key factor for sales. What other people plays, get achievements for, post screenshots, or make artwork of is a marketing hook to produce sales.
In that regard, letting people selectively add or remove said visibility may impact sales, as some games 'nobody plays' would never show up in activity feeds, recomendations of what your friends are playing and alike.
From a privacy perspective it's a must have and something I agree on. But in the reality of where we are... I don't see a store shooting itself on it's foot for the sake of John Smith not displaying his playitme in 'Hentai Visual Novel #442'
Steam already has an almost identical set of privacy tools with nearly all of the same concerns. They are just cumbersome and overly broad.
I get where you are coming from, but instead of hiding 2 or 3 games i need to hide my whole 830 game library, which i would say is a bigger detriment to steam.
People have gotten used to 'public' being the default state for everything.
This was going to be my point exactly; having a user completely lockdown their profile as full private means less links for people to click, less exposure to games, less cross-interests being discovered, etc. I have all these fun profile things unlocked which would be neat to display, but I can't, because I have to have EVERYTHING on full lock instead of just some things.
The privacy settings are already there - there's just no ability to actually dial it BACK from being full private. Ironically in many ways I want to have the ability to have 'less' privacy on my profile, by being able to show some games and interests that I have without having to lock or show everything (I know you can private some things but like, what's the point of hiding your game collection when you can see everyone's badges/achievements/etc, for example).
The social pressure for being public and the stigma making things private carry ('you have something to hide') means there's a minority making the decision to go full private for a few adult games. Social networks have made a good deal to pressure people into making everything public.
Although individually may be persons doing that, there's more than 20 million daily users on Steam.