How To Hide Or Remove Games From Your Steam Library

The Steam library has a wonderful memory in that it remembers literally every game you’ve ever installed, but you can also hide or remove those games if you no longer want them in view.

Maybe you want to clean things up a bit. Or maybe you’re just a little ashamed of a title you decided to purchase and don’t want others to see it when you’re scrolling through your list. Either way, you can hide or remove games from your Steam library if the desire ever pops up.

The interesting thing is that Steam will remember any game at all. If it’s been in your account at one point in time, it’s visible in your library. It doesn’t matter if the title is a full game, a demo, or even a game that’s no longer available. For example, Amazon’s team based PvP shooter Crucible was cancelled and brought offline. It still shows up in my Steam library and I can still install it. Obviously, there’s no need for that since the game can’t be played. So this would be a good game to hide or remove from my library completely.

But just how do you hide and remove games from your Steam library? How do you view hidden games? This guide will walk you through those steps. Let’s dive in.

How to hide or remove games from your Steam library

Hiding and removing games are both very different, even they serve the same purpose. Which is to get one of those game cards out of your library, or the name out of the list if you prefer the list view. But hiding a game, as the name suggests, simply hides the game from your main library and puts it into its own special area. Games that are hidden cannot be seen by friends or the public without a few clicks.

Removing a game of course, actually deletes the game from your library as if it was never there in the first place. This means you’d also have to buy the game again if you ever decided you wanted to play it after the deletion. So keep in mind that removing a game should be a last resort thing. Use this only when you know for certain you’re never going to play a specific game again.

Let’s start with hiding games in your library and go from there.

Hiding a game from your library

Find the game you want to hide and right click it

First open up the Steam client and then navigate to your library. Once in your library, scroll and find the game that you want to be hidden from view. Right click the game to bring up the pop up menu.

Select manage and “hide this game”

Once the pop up menu appears, you will see an option that says Manage. Click on that to extend the menu and then hover over the option that says Hide This Game. This will hide the game from your library so it isn’t visible when scrolling through it.

Where to find your hidden games

Once you’ve hidden a game, you may want to know where to find it. Especially if you still want to play it and you’ve only hidden the game simply so it wasn’t visible from your main library. Not to worry. Finding your hidden games is easy.

Click the view button at the top of the Steam client

Find the view button at the top of the Steam client and click it. Right under library, which should be the top option, you’ll see hidden games. Click on that and you’ll see every game that you stuffed away in there.

This is also where you can unhide games if you want to make them visible again.

Right click a hidden game, then click manage

Just like before when you wanted to hide a game, you can right click any of the hidden games in the hidden library and click manage. Then, click Remove From Hidden. and the game will be placed back into your normal library. It’s as simple as that.

Removing a game from your library

If you’d rather bypass hiding the game and remove it from your library altogether, you can do that too. But remember that this is the point from no return. If you remove a game from your Steam library, then you’re deleting it for good, and you’d end up having to buy it again if you ever wanted to replay it.

Click on the help button

You will find the help button at the top of the Steam client just like you did with the view button. Help will be all the way at the end.

Click on Steam support

Next, click on Steam Support from the list of options that comes up when you click the help button.

Click the game you want to remove

Now, click on the game you want to remove and select I want to permanently remove this game from my account. If you don’t see the game you want to remove, then you will need to search for it by typing the name in the search box at the bottom.

Once you select “permanently remove” this will then lead you to a secondary page of the deletion process where Valve is basically asking you to confirm that you want to delete the game. Once you confirm, the process will be complete and the game will be removed from your library entirely.

One thing to add is that if you want a refund for this game, request a refund before you go through with deletion. As requesting a refund will result in the game being removed from your library if the refund is approved.