I have 268 games on Steam. A good chunk of them have never been launched. And when I want to play, I spend an unreasonable amount of time scrolling through my library before ending up launching something I already know, or not launching anything at all.
Attention issues do not help. Too many choices, not enough criteria, and the result is paralysis. I needed a tool that asks the right question: not "what game do you want to play" but "what state of mind are you in and how much time do you have."
That is what I built: Steam Game Recommender.
What the tool does
You enter your Steam ID or username, the tool analyzes your library and filters your games by context:
- Quick: short session, games you can launch and quit without friction
- Relaxing: no stress, no consequence to losing
- Competitive: when you want to play against someone
- Multiplayer / Co-op / Local co-op: depending on the format of the evening
- Undiscovered: games in your library you have never launched
There is also a genre filter in both French and English, and sorting that adapts to the selected category.
HowLongToBeat integration
The detail that changes everything: each game shows its estimated completion time from HowLongToBeat. When I have one hour to play, I do not want to accidentally start an 80-hour RPG. When I have a free evening, knowing that a game takes 6 hours to finish and that I could complete it this weekend is actually useful.
Steam does not provide this information. Having it directly in the interface, next to the recorded playtime, is what makes the choice concrete rather than abstract.
Steam Party Finder
The second part of the project is the Steam Party Finder. The problem: a group wants to play together and nobody knows which games everyone owns. Each person has a 200-game library, nobody is going to compare them by hand.
The tool takes multiple Steam IDs, compares libraries, and outputs the games the whole group owns, filtered the same way as the recommender. Same co-op categories, same HLTB completion times. Thirty seconds to do what would take ten minutes manually.
Why I built this
Not because I thought it would be useful to everyone. Because it was a real problem for me and I had the tools to solve it over a weekend. The fact that others use it is a bonus, but the starting point was selfish in the right way: I just wanted to stop spending 20 minutes picking a game.
Both tools are free, no account required, no tracking. You enter your Steam ID, you get recommendations, that is it.