How Do You Organize Your Steam Library?

I know that my Steam library is a little larger than most people's, but you don't have to get anywhere near that size to start running into organizational problems. So, I'm wondering, how do you organize your Steam games?

I find the very limited category functionality in Steam to be troublesome. For example, you can only put something in one category. So I run into problems where something may be an Action-Adventure. Or an Action-Platformer. Or a strategy RPG adventure game. Of course, it can ONLY go into one category, so I'm stuck having to say "adventure" or "platformer". Or just throwing everything into "action" and "strategy" and "FPS" and not refining it any further than that.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if Steam just used tag-clouds and then applied the tags the games are listed in Steam under, into the client? And then let you add your own custom tags on top of that?

Anyway, I'd love to know what solutions some of you have come up with. I feel like my method is sloppy, inaccurate, overly general, and frustrating. :/

• Favourites
• Games I don't want
• Games I've finished
• Games I plan on playing at some point
• Games I'm currently playing or plan on playing soon

I organize by genre, and if there is more than a full screen in one category I divide them into subsections, like: (Strategy Real Time, Strategy Turn Based) and (Shooter First Person, Shooter Third Person) and so on. I also favorite games I'm actively playing.

I don't at all. I keep a relatively small number of games installed and just view the installed category. I used to try and organize, but I ran into the same problems as you listed. I gave it up.

a favorites list and a "welcome to the family" list.

I don't. It's a free for all in there. (Well, they're in alphabetical order)

I don't, which considering I have 200 games on it is probably a bad option!

Alphabetically, but I only have 28 games on steam, so I can see all them without having to scroll.

I have a little over 150 games, I just leave it completely unsorted in one giant unsorted alphabetical list. I don't even filter installed and uninstalled.

• Installed
• Not installed

And it's actually pretty easy for me because Steam filters out the ones that aren't installed. Otherwise they're in generic ABC order.

I can see how this might be troubling if you've got, say, the biggest hard drive there is dedicated to games and have like five or six hundred installed on it, but do you really need all five or six hundred of those games installed at one time?

Anyway, Steam does have its own favorites menu and all. I just can't see how having the games you're currently playing at the top of your games list isn't enough, or shortcuts on the desktop.

The one im playing i set as favorite i minimize the rest in order to hide the fact i'll never play them

Same, I try to keep my installed games at around 20 or so at all times.

• Favorites (usually games I've completed but still want to play)
• Completed (games I've completed that I don't want to return to)
• Infinite Play (typically multiplayer-focused and sandbox games)
• Miscellaneous (odd duplicates of games I have and Portal 2 - The Final Hours)
• Unfinished Business (games I'm meaning to get to)
• Games (the rest)

okay I've made it!

I've got

favorites

finished

played (games that can't be finished that I am done with such as audiosurf)

still playing (games that I am actively still playing)

unfinished (games that I am not actively still playing but still want to go back to)

unplayed

and shit

I just sort by installed, if I'm not playing something I usually uninstall it.

I organize them based on how many hours it would take me to beat them.

Haven't really organized them at all. I only have about 40 games in my Library.

One of the main issues is simply finding games, in the first place. The second is organizing them once you've played/stopped playing or finished them. I install way too much stuff (the steam library is on a dedicated 3tb drive) and have completed/played way to little (I've played about 15% of 1700 titles and finished maybe 3% of them). Even just sitting down and saying "I feel like playing a strategy RPG game" is daunting, because there's so much to search through and while you can use the search field for titles, you can't tell it "show games in my library that are tagged as both RPG and strategy".

I find it really bizarre at the features Steam does and doesn't have. As I mentioned, no tagging. No searching by tags or keywords. However, they include the Metacritic score and Last Played dates in your results/library list.

I do think I may be going about it the wrong way, though. I currently have it setup like the following (but I've only actually sorted a small handful of my total games, because I'd get carpal tunnel syndrome trying to do every one of them).

• Favorites
• Action
• Adventure
• Casual
• FPS
• Online FPS
• Puzzle
• Racing
• Roguelike
• RPG
• Stealth
• Strategy /; RTS
• Survival
• Tower Defense
• _Non-Steam Games
• _Media (movies, etc)

I was really hoping someone maybe made a third party utility using Steam's API to kind of help with this, but I haven't come across such a thing, yet. :/

I don't. I leave it to alphabetical order and display only the installed games. Currently that makes 28 of them and that fits in one screen.

Alphabetical

Used to have them by installed/not installed but I found that I mostly never went down to the 'not installed' section so I ended up forgetting about a ton of games I owned. The downfall of having like 800 games on Steam, I guess.

I have a few games I play a lot in my favorites and everything else is alphabetical. I keep it set to only show installed games at all times.

I don't really however they got thrown into the list when I bought em' is how they stay.

Steam library? Hrmmmm... that's an interesting thought... shortcuts and folders on my PC seem to work well for me... (now if I could just get the Steam virus/memory hog/resource sucker to automatically close when I finish playing a game)...

Once you break 100 games in your Steam Library it gets really messy. I actually just use the grid view to browse games because the tagging feature tends to be more cumbersome than just an alphabetical list.

I don't. Only got 106 games, so not an issue yet. Just list all games in detailed view. I'll give it some thought when I cross the 200 line maybe.

Favorites are games I want to finish/master. Essentially the backlog.

If it's installed, it's a game I'd like to have around at the moment, whether it's something I want to finish/master, or something I'd like to play whenever the hell I want to play it.

If it's in "!Backlog" (the exclamation mark is to push it to the top of the list of categories), it's a game that's installed that I'm not currently playing.

Everything else gets stuffed into a letter category.

Then I display only Installed games.

@branthog: There's no way for me to say this without sounding like a smartass, but why not favorite a handful of games, completing them (or sticking to them until you just can't play them anymore) and then putting different stuff in favorites? You could keep an RTS, an action game, an FPS, and something else in there.

I (and many others) have issues beating games because I've just got so damn many of them, though my collection pales in comparison to yours. I'm just trying to get around this by picking a few and playing them 'til I beat them, and sticking to only a handful of games (or, for now, just one). Do you really need to try and play that many games at once?

Anytime fun, games completed, need to start/finish, Won't play

I don't. Probably since I don't have enough games yet.

Like I say, only part of it is dealing with the games you're currently playing. The other part is finding the games you want to play next. I usually Favorite the games I'm playing most immediately (ie, an MMO, a MOBA, two or three online shooters, a couple RPGs, several strategy games, etc) while I'm going to be playing them for however many days/weeks/months. Maybe I'm just trying to solve an OCD problem that most other people don't have (that is, I have this weird compulsion to have all of my games in some sort of order for later reference). Maybe the majority of people just don't have that bug up their ass to the point that they look at a list of their games and think "everythink must be in zee categorical order!".

I sort them by genre, but I really should sort my games based on how reckless the purchase was.

I've just dedicated an old 640GB drive as my 'steamdisk'. Games I'm completely over (or were a total disappointment) I uninstall, then I show only installed, and I moved all my EA games out to origin, otherwise its a free for all. I feel like if I pinned games I'd forget to go back and finish others.

@branthog: I like your idea of tags, but I think the restriction of a game only having one category is good. My steam library is huge enough, making games show up multiple times would make it impossible to navigate.

I just put stuff in either genre or franchise categories, and then use the Favorites thing to keep my frequently and currently played games up at the top. I don't play that many kinds of games so I can be fairly specific. I also have a decent number of franchises together like Half Life, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, etc.

I also only ever show what's installed unless I'm looking to download something random for a quick play session because I'm bored.

I simply have all games selected regardless of whether they're installed, I like to know what Steam games I have in case I forget and also if I'm in the mood to download one I haven't done yet.

• Favorites - games I will continue to play after finishing them, or games that don't "end" (counter strike, X3)
• Backlog - games I eventually want to play/finish
• Finished - games I'm done with, but might go back to
• Simulators - farms, planes, trains, cars, trucks, spaceships, whatever.
• Source Engine Games - there are a lot of them
• Time Wasters - this started in uni as games I could play in class; mostly just games that don't require my undivided attention (trackmania, FTL, minecraft)
• Uninstalled - everything else

games I'm currently playing stay in the main list or favorites.

For as much as I use Steam, you'd think I even knew you could organize them. XD I just leave it alphabetically. I have a ton of games and it's easy enough to not have to think of what category each game is in.

And I sa...

Oh wait. I misunderstood. I was under the impression that you were just picking a new game, any game, often, not even trying to stick to a few. Sorry :(.

Mine is

• Ongoing stuff that doesn't really have an endgame and/or I'm continuously racking up hours (ie SF4 AE, SFxT, Saints Row: The Third)
• Stuff that I want to put emphasis on to play soon so I'm more likely to actually play something than just aimlessly scroll a list of 200 games looking for something
• Stuff that I have finished and generally played fairly exhaustively and I'm done with for now, but may possibly want to revisit
• Stuff that I'm done with and I am fairly certain I won't come back to
• Stuff that I'm just never going to play, more for standalone launchers like half-life 2 and half-life source deathmatch than for actual games
• Then everything else on my list

I've probably got about 50 games categorised, which would be about a quarter of my library. The other stuff is mostly uncategorised because the tools for doing so in steam are AWFUL. AWWWWWWFUL. >:(

woah! i've got 125 and i never realized i could organize them into categories lol

Essentially I organize like this:

• playing now or soon
• keyboard only
• keyboard and mouse
• controller
• beaten

only the names are different.

Installed.

That's it.

I used to have a better set of categories, but I kept getting that bug that wipes them. I got tired of remaking them and settled for this. When I found out how to backup categories I forgot how the better list was set up.

Here are my categories in order from top to bottom (270 games total).

EDIT: Decided to change them around because, I'm weird that way.

It's not the most elegant of solutions, but I just throw everything I'm interested in into my favorites. From games I mean to start, to games I mean to finish, to games I've played the heck out of but still crave more of.

Half of them are by genre, the other half are in the default library because I got lazy.

By genre, but my definitions tend to be rather broad. I sort games Saint's Row The Third under action, for example, not "open-world crime action game" or anything crazy like that.

I don't categorise them, just seems like a waste of time to me. What's the point?

I can understand categorising something if you need to manually organise where the files are (like I do with my Seinfeld rips) but on Steam? Eh I just browse by what's installed and switch to "all games" when I need to install something else.

I have around 230 games and have never had any issues with it being "messy" ...how messy can an alphabetical list really be?

No clue, I have around 210 games alphabetically organized and I've had zero issues yet.

Same here.

Favorites: Games I'm in the middle of, or haven't started yet, or multiplayer games I like to play occasionally

Games (default category): Games I've beaten, or are done with.

I have a category for "Not sure how or why I own these."