Thousands of Steam Users Call for New Feature to Be Added to the Platform
Thousands of Steam users are calling on Valve to add a game randomizer to its popular PC launcher. While many of these requests appear to stem from indecisiveness, that’s not the only argument Steam users have articulated in favor of a “random game” button or a similar solution.
According to a March 2025 study by Newzoo, PC gamers spend most of their time playing older titles, with games released at least six years ago accounting for over two-thirds of total playtime. While this trend is largely driven by evergreen hits such as DotA 2 and League of Legends, users working through their backlogs also contribute. However, not all of them are always certain about what they want to play next.
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Some Steam Users Want Valve To Add a ‘Random Game’ Feature
Thinking about this problem, Reddit user YipuTheDerp has recently called for Valve to add a “random game” feature to Steam, citing their indecisiveness as a key reason. Expanding on the idea, they proposed an instance-based randomizer that could be applied to individual custom game collections, allowing users to narrow the selection pool as desired. The post received over 8,600 upvotes and hundreds of comments within 15 hours of going live, reaching the top of the r/Steam front page on November 29, thus suggesting a vocal segment of the community is supportive of the idea. While some users echoed the OP’s point about using a randomizer to navigate their ever-growing Steam backlogs when they’re not sure what to play next, others said they would welcome the feature simply for the novelty, arguing that discovering an unexpected favorite could become a meta game of its own, akin to collecting Steam Trading Cards.
Steam *Does* Have One Feature to Help Discover Games in User Libraries
Although Valve’s popular PC launcher doesn’t have a true game randomizer, it’s been offering a conceptually related solution since February 2020, when it added the “Play Next” feature to Steam. This virtual shelf does not leave things to chance, however, but instead uses machine learning to recommend unplayed games from a user’s library that they are most likely to enjoy, based on past purchases and play history. Initially limited to three suggestions, the system was later expanded and offers eight as of late November 2025. However, because it only recommends titles the user has never played, its selections are inherently more predictable than those of a true randomizer.
The Play Next feature can be accessed from one’s Steam library, by clicking the corresponding “Library” button in the client’s top toolbar. This leads to an interface containing the so-called Game Shelves, with “All Games” being the only default option. Seeing Valve’s AI-powered recommendations requires clicking the “+ Add shelf” option near the top of this screen (immediately below the “What’s New” section) and then selecting “Play Next” from the dropdown menu. Some PC gamers who joined the recent calls for Valve to add a randomizer to Steam have argued that such a feature could feasibly be implemented as another one of the launcher’s Game Shelves, ideally with a convenient option to refresh it at will.
From a software engineering perspective, the proposed solution would likely not be overly difficult for Valve to implement, as creating true randomness is a long-solved problem and can be achieved with an algorithm like the Fisher-Yates shuffle, which can be implemented in C++—the primary programming language of the Steam PC client—in just a few lines of code. That said, there is currently no indication that Valve is considering adding a game randomizer to Steam.
Some Third-Party Services Can Pick Random Games from Any (Public) Steam Library
In the meantime, several free services offer similar functionality. The most widely known is SteamDB, whose Steam Calculator tool can randomly select a game from a user’s library, and repeat the process as needed. However, Valve could still improve on the concept, as a native randomizer would work with any account, whereas SteamDB requires users to set their profiles to public in order to lottery-pick titles from their game libraries.