How can I sort/organize my Steam game library?

Question

My game list is approaching 100 games and it is starting to get difficult to sort them. I've categorized them by genre but it's still difficult to find them (and my backlog is getting bigger).

I also have Steam installed in more than one computer so I have to repeat the sorting for each one of them.

Is there any option to have the games ordered in a nice and clean way?

Edit: About the library sync between computers it could be this problem.

Answer 1

You've got more than just categories in your library. You also have filters. You can filter the list by games you have installed, by games you have played recently and by games you marked as favorites. If you've played that game recently, you'll also find it in Steam's jumplist, or at the top of Steam's tray icon's context menu.

What you really need though is search; nothing really beats that. You don't even have to use Steam for that: if you told Steam to, all of your Steam games (except shortcuts) are added to the start menu. Want Team Fortress 2? Press the ⊞ Win button on your keyboard, type the first letters of the game, press Enter and you'll have it launched faster than any category or filter combo can.

Answer 2

Depressurizer is an application that will help you more easily manage game categories in a large Steam library.

Answer 3

Since your problem is deciding what to play, you order your games as follows:

• Favorites: Games you are currently playing, or games from your backlog that you intend to play soon. Don't be afraid to cut items from this if you stop playing. Your goal is to have as short a a list as possible when you need to pick a game to play.
• Completed: Games that were good, but you finished them, so they aren't candidates for play. Come back to this list if you want to replay an old game or need to uninstall something to make room.
• Rubbish: Games you will probably never play again. Things that were cheap in the Steam sale, or turned out to be really bad.
• No category: Everything else. Your backlog. Things you will play one day, maybe, but not today.

Answer 4

You have only two Steam features that could help you categorize your games: categories and favorites. Favorite mark has priority on category and cause the game to appear in the first group on the left sidebar.

I have too more than hundred games and I created some categories like FPS, RPG, Indie etc and I use the favorites mark to tag games that I play often and games that I am going to start or finish.

Answer 5

You can sort your games by steam user ratings on https://steamdb.info/calculator/

Answer 6

You can assign each game to one or more categories by right-clicking their name and choosing "Set Category..."

I've noticed that setting a game as a Favorite overrides any other categories you set, though.

Answer 7

Personally, I have

• Favorites
• MMOs
• Role Playing Games
• Real-time strategy Games
• Sid Meier Games
• Turn-based strategy games
• Crap I shouldn't have bought.

Answer 8

The New Steam Library has heavily overhauled the ability to categorize, filter and order your Steam Library.

Dynamic Categories

Dynamic categories provide similar functionality to Depressurizer - recommended by p0rkjello. When creating a new collection you have the option between "create collection" and "create dynamic collection". If you select the latter than you can have Steam automatically populate the collection for you. Currently you can auto populate with the following options:

• Players - Single player, Multiplayer, Cooperative
• Play State - Ready to play, Installed locally, Played, Unplayed
• Genre - Action, Adventure, ..., Sports, Strategy
• Hardware Support - Controllers (full), Controllers (partial), VR
• Features - Trading cards, Workshop, Achievements, Remote Play Together
• Store Tags
  A search box is provided to search for the tag(s) you want.

Filtering

These are temporary ways to filter your Steam library to find a game you want to play.
The filters are available at the top of the navigation panel - where your collections are shown.

• Search box*
  Search games by title.

• Advanced Filtering*
  Filter by the options provided in dynamic categories.

• By type, whether it's: a game, soundtrack, video or tool.

• Show only ready to play games

Sorting

• Sort by recent activity*
  This is available at the top of the navigation panel.

• Sort by
  This is available at the top of the main view, when viewing a collection.

Items with an * currently don't change the main view, only the navigation panel's content.

Answer 9

I have over 100 games myself. I use categories and category "descriptor", such as: "Puzzler - Occasionally Fun" and "Puzzler - Rarely Fun", "Puzzler - Boring" and the bottom tier "Puzzler - POS" (Piece of "sheep's droppings").

Any game I install starts off in the category "Experimenting". Once I have a good idea of what I think about the game, its category will change. A few select games also get tagged with "Favorite" so they are at the topic of the game's library.

I rarely use the filters of "installed" or "recently played". I do occasionally use the find filter (type in part of the title, and get the list narrowed down to just a few games).

I never use the windows search because none of the Steam games are installed on my start menu/program files group.

I continually suggest to Steam to allow us to have multiple categories. This would allow us to use "Puzzler" and "Fun" and "Beaten" categories on a game to better describe and classify it. But I doubt they'll do it--- Steam is not very concerned with improving customers experience with their products.

Answer 10

In short, the problem with your categories not transferring should not be an issue since Steam actually syncs all of your category information to the cloud. It is a matter of patience in giving the alternate installs of Steam on your secondary devices a few restarts until they show up. By resetting your categories right away when you see they aren't there you are basically giving the sync another version of categories to sync up and it is simply over-riding everything you did before with an exact copy. So instead of re-establishing the categories, just keep restarting the client until they show up from the primary device.

Unfortunately when I say "SHOULD NOT BE AN ISSUE" I mean to put emphasis on should. It doesn't always work to perfection. Just a fact of life at this point.

As for your secondary question of being able to order your games in a more organized manner you really have a limited number of obvious options for this:

• View Options Selection: Detail View, List View, Grid View (I prefer List View)
• General Sorting: Clicking on the Column you want to sort by.
• Favorites: Selecting which games you are playing at any given time to make them favorites.
• Categories: Which you are already familiar with, naturally.

I personally find categories to be more trouble than they are worth and can make my game list more intimidating than it actually is. With 210 games currently on my Steam library, it is much easier for me to simply manage my list by games installed vs. not installed and then to further that of the 15 or so games I may have installed I keep about 5 set as a Favorite. I never go over a certain amount of games installed and I usually decide which of the games I want to uninstall to make room by sorting them by which games are cloud connected. That means if I uninstall it, the save files remain saved for me and will return when I re-install the game and come back to it.

I know it's easy to say, "Categories organize my list and organizing my list makes it easier for me to navigate" but maybe you should delete all of your categories and give a category-less list a shot for a month and see how it goes.

Answer 11

Adding to the other answers:

You can (and should) just hide games instead of moving them to a seperate category. Then those rubbish games are only visible in the (then created) "hidden" Tab.

To hide a game from your library right-click the game, choose "set category" and then check the box "Hide this game in my library".

I use this for example for the L4D2 and Chivalry Beta and similar stuff i will never ever need.

Edit: I would have commented, but i lack the karma :(