How to Stop Awkward Games Showing Up on Next Year’s Steam Replay

Steam Replays are great. They provide stats about your gaming habits from the last year, showing off your dedication to having a good time. But they also show every game you’ve played to other members of your Steam family so if you want to stop that from happening next year, you have to act now.

Steam Replay Shows Everything You Played Over the Year

Steam Replay is a year-in-review type feature provided by Steam near the end of each year. The Steam Replay generally arrives in mid-December, as new releases die down. If you took a look at yours, you may have noticed the types of data it revealed: the exact games you played, how many hours you played them, the most heavily played gaming categories over the year, and so on. Generally, pretty harmless stuff.

But Steam Replay can also show off some things you might want to keep secret from others. Maybe you don’t want your family to know about the hundreds of hours you put into Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom over the past 12 months, and that’s ok. Remember that Steam Replay shows everything you played, regardless of its rating.

If you haven’t generated last year’s Steam Replay yet, you can head here to do so. It will show off all of the things I mentioned earlier, including data about games you may have wanted to keep private from everyone.

At the top of your Steam Replay page, you can make it private or visible only to your friends. But this doesn’t change what information is a part of your Steam Replay, only who is allowed to see it. This would be fine and dandy, if it weren’t for a little exception mentioned at the bottom of the page, which reads: “All adult members in a Steam Family can automatically access the Steam Replay for other members of the Steam Family.”

Your Steam Family Can Always See Your Replay

Even if you don’t share your Replay with anyone, even if you set it to private, adult members of your Steam Family can still look at it and see everything. Every game you’ve played and how much time you spent on it over the year.

I’m sure that Valve’s intent is to let parents see what their kids are up to, making sure they aren’t secretly playing games that they shouldn’t be. But let’s be real, a lot of us use Steam Families to share games with other adults, be it friends, siblings, cousins, whatever. People might look at us a little differently at the next get-together if they knew how much Hello Kitty Island Adventure has been consuming our lives.

Maybe you just don’t want other adults in your Steam Family to know how many hours you spent playing games this year, or that you blew off some other obligation to stay at home with your Steam Deck. Whatever your reason, if you want to save face next time the Steam Replay rolls around, you have to start now.

How to Hide Games on Your Steam Replay From Your Steam Family

To start with, let me say this: you can choose to never generate a Steam Replay at all, if you want to. When the end of the year rolls around, you can just choose to opt-out. Alternatively, you can choose which games to hide from next year’s Replay early (like, right now).

Do this by setting these games you to “private” before you play them.

Set games in your Steam library to hidden and private by right-clicking a game in your Steam client. From there, select Properties > Privacy, and use the “Mark as Private” toggle.

In the future, this will prevent these games from appearing in your Steam Replay. Just remember that you’ll need to do this before ever starting up the game.

If you had to endure any awkward conversations because of what you played last year, you have my condolences. On the bright side, you can at least prepare in advance for next year.