How to Find a Steam Game for a Friend

Hey everyone, Adrian here.

While I was building SecludedGems, I realised it quietly does something I never planned for: it's genuinely good at finding games for your friends, not just for you. You know the friend I mean. The one who's been rotating the same three games for years and swears there's nothing new worth playing. This is about picking something they'll actually take a chance on.

The trick is dead simple: instead of pasting your own Steam profile, you paste theirs. SecludedGems reads what they already play, works out their taste from that, and hands you a short list of well-reviewed games they've probably never heard of, each one matched to what they already love.

Paste their profile, not yours

All you need is a link to their public Steam profile, the same URL you'd copy from their profile page in your browser. Drop that in the profile box instead of your own and search. Because it's reading their library rather than yours, the picks lean toward their taste, not the games you keep trying to convert them to.

Every pick lands on a single card so you're not left digging around five tabs to vet it. You get a plain-English reason it fits them, the honest catch pulled from real negative reviews (so you're not blindsided after you've already bought it), the price in your local currency including any active discount, and the Steam Deck status if that's their setup. If one looks close but not quite right, hit "More like this" to pivot the whole list toward it. If you want the full walkthrough of how the search works, I went through it in how to find your next hidden Steam gem.

Nudge the picks toward your plan

Here's where the craving box earns its keep. It takes plain-language asks, so you can steer the picks toward whatever you've actually got in mind for them. Trying to drag them into more co-op nights with you? Type "co-op" and the list leans that way. Want something they can finish in a weekend rather than another 200-hour sink? Try "something short". Same goes for "cozy", "couch co-op", or "nothing endless".

A worked example. Say your friend loves cozy farming sims like Stardew but keeps replaying the same one. You'd paste their Steam link in the profile box, and in the craving box you might type: "cozy farming or life sim like Stardew, nothing too grindy, something a bit different." You'll get well-reviewed picks in that lane that aren't the obvious ones they've already worn out.

What if their profile is private?

One honest heads-up: reading their library only works if their Steam game details are set to public, and that's their setting to change, not something you can flip for them. So this works best for a friend whose profile is already public, or for when it isn't a surprise and you can just ask them to make it public for a minute.

If their profile is private and you'd rather keep the whole thing a surprise, you're not stuck. Skip the profile box entirely and lean on the craving box on its own. Describe them in your own words, something like "relaxing games for someone who loved Stardew and Animal Crossing", and it'll match from that alone. It's not quite as tailored as reading a full library, but it still beats guessing your way through the Steam store at midnight.

It's free, there's no account, and it doesn't store anyone's library, yours or theirs. Go find them their next obsession: secludedgems.com.

Adrian