Here at PC Gamer we’re all busy sharing our Steam Replays with each other in Slack, comparing how many games we’ve played, how many ‘cheevos we’ve earned, and how many of us have the word ‘Dwarf’ in our spider graphs—which is at least five of us. The Dwarf genre had a strong 2024!
It’s fun to see our stats and how they compare with one another as well as Steam’s “median” users, but it’s not hard to envision a bit of bashfulness when it comes to the data in our Steam Replays, too. I’m a little taken aback that just Stardew Valley and Balatro combine to form almost 40% of my playtime this year. I should really give my Steam Deck a fighting chance to gather a bit of dust in 2025.
And, y’know, there could be other slightly embarrassing data nuggets in someone’s Steam Replay. For instance, say you’re a bit reluctant to advertise that you play adult games. I’m not judging anyone, but Steam is filled with thousands of NSFW games with names like Horny Villa, MILF’s Plaza, Butt Knight, Peeping Dorm Manager, and Sweet Story Wet-Bottom Pie 18+ Adult Only Content (that’s the full title).
The good news is you can make your Steam Replay private or friends only by selecting the option right at the top of your Replay page. But way, way down at the bottom of the page there’s a note about Steam Family members, and it seems worth pointing out:
“All adult members in a Steam Family can automatically access the Steam Replay for other members of the Steam Family.”
At least non-adults can’t see what the grownups have been up to: “Child members do not have any special access priviledge.”
Steam Family members being able to peep each others’ Replays probably isn’t a big deal most of the time, but I can see it causing some friction around the dinner table over the holidays. Are your grades dropping and Steam Replay shows you spent 120 hours playing Helldivers 2 during the month of your midterms? Do you really want to explain why you spent nearly all of June and July clicking a banana in Banana? Are you cool with Mom, Dad, and Aunt Verna seeing “Hentai” on your spider graph? Maybe not.
As Mollie put it in our slack chat: “make sure your pops doesn’t see you spent 400 hours in futa games.” (I don’t know what that means and I’m not gonna Google it while I’m logged in at work.)
Many of us don’t only have actual family in our Steam family. The feature can also be used to share games with friends, and if all those friends are marked as adults, your Replay is fair game. Maybe your friends already know you spend a lot of time playing Furry Feet Girls, or maybe they’re about to find out.
In general I’m a bit skittish about multi-billion dollar companies collecting and collating my data, so I’m not a huge fan of things like Spotify Wrapped or Steam Replay. I sure wouldn’t like it if other companies did it. Would I be happy if my internet provider was like “Hey, here’s a bunch of graphs showing all the websites you spent the most time on this year! All of them. Look, here’s all of them. Even that one. Sinner.” Probably not.
