How to make your Steam library public

The setting you actually need

Steam has several privacy dropdowns, and they do different things. The one that controls whether other sites can read your games is called Game details. Making your profile public is not sufficient on its own — profile visibility and game details are separate settings, and you can have a fully public profile with a completely hidden game list.

1. 1Open Steam, either the desktop app or steamcommunity.com in a browser.
2. 2Click your account name in the top-right, then Profile.
3. 3Click Edit Profile.
4. 4Open the Privacy Settings tab.
5. 5Set My profile to Public.
6. 6Set Game details to Public. This is the important one.
7. 7If you want your hours played to be visible too, untick “Always keep my total playtime private even if users can see my game details.”

There is no save button — Steam saves privacy changes as you make them.

Why “Friends Only” doesn't work

This is the most common mistake, and it's an understandable one. Setting Game details to Friends Only feels like the safe middle option, and it does work for actual Steam friends looking at your profile.

But third-party sites don't read your profile as a friend. They query Steam's public Web API using an application key, and that key isn't friends with anyone. As far as the API is concerned, Friends Only and Private are the same answer: nothing.

So if a tool tells you your library is unreadable while you can plainly see your own games, Friends Only is the first thing to check.

Your friends list is a separate setting again

My friends list has its own dropdown, independent of both your profile and your game details. A tool that offers to load your friends so you can pick from them needs that one public as well.

It's entirely possible to have a public profile, public game details, and a private friends list — in which case games load fine but the friend picker comes up empty.

Checking that it worked

Steam's API caches profile data, so a change isn't always visible to other sites the same second you make it. Give it a few minutes before concluding something is broken.

The quickest way to verify is to open your own profile in a private or logged-out browser window. What you see there is roughly what a stranger sees — and what an API-based tool can read.

What sites can and can't see when it's public

It's worth being clear about the scope, because “make your library public” sounds broader than it is.

• Visible: the list of games on your account, your playtime (unless you kept that private separately), your persona name, and your avatar.
• Not visible: your email address, your real name, your payment methods, your purchase history, or anything about your account security.
• Not possible: no third-party site can act on your account, buy anything, or change your settings. Signing in through Steam proves you control an account ID and grants nothing else.

Turning it back off

The same path in reverse. Set Game details back to Private and third-party tools immediately stop being able to read your games. Nothing you've already used breaks, and no site keeps a claim on the data — though any site that cached your library may hold a copy until it expires or you ask them to delete it.