How to Filter Out Sexy or Bloody Steam Games
All I’ve ever seen on Valve’s New & Popular list are games I’ll never play, including these weird sexy games, horrible Early Access games, and other oddities.
Fortunately, there is a way to heavily filter out the games you see on Steam, but it’s somewhat buried in Steam’s clunky user interface. This is how you do it.
Find the settings menu you want
To personalize your Steam store, you’ll first need to find the correct settings menu. Don’t look at the Steam settings menu (Steam> Settings), or your profile settings, or even the Your Store link on the main Steam Store page. Instead, you’ll want to click your account name in the upper right corner of the Steam user interface and click on “Settings.”
(Note to Valve: It would be great to have access to all Steam options from a single, easy-to-find Settings menu, which can include feed customization. Just saying.)
Delete the types of games you are not interested in
I have nothing against Early Access games – titles that may be in beta or active development – but there are many and sometimes they can feel a little overwhelming when viewed on the Steam store. And it’s great to be the kind of person who prefers to know about games when they’re finished rather than when they’re being worked on.
In the Steam Store Content Settings, you can choose whether you want to see different games on the Steam Store: Early Access games, pre-orders, software, videos, movies, and VR content. If you are not interested in different categories – for example, you Netflix all movies instead of buying them, for example – simply uncheck each category to remove associated content from Steam. You can also hide overly bloody or sexy headlines if one isn’t for you.
Filter games by keywords
The Filter Tags section of the Steam Store Content Settings is one of the more useful features. If there are certain types of games that you are not interested in at all, such as “anime” or “free games”, just enter the tag. You only have three tags to filter (sigh), so make them good.
Bonus: even more content filters
As you may have noticed, there are a few more tweaks in the Store Content Settings menu. If you’re using the Steam Discovery Queue or New Release Queue to find games that might interest you, you can customize the content that appears in each one. Filter the titles you want to see by categories – Early Access Games, Software, Videos, and Unreleased Games – or filter out individual tags that aren’t interesting to you. You can also uninstall games by platform if you don’t think you’ll ever play games on a Mac that you don’t own, or on Linux that you don’t ever intend to customize.