Your Playfull account now starts with Steam

Starting this week, every new account on Playfull goes through Steam Connect during sign-up. It's a small change to the onboarding flow with a deliberate reason behind it — and since so much of Playfull's experience runs on Steam, it's worth walking through what changed, why, and what it means for the rest of the platform.

What changed and why

When new players create a Playfull account, they sign in with Steam as part of onboarding. Steam Connect does one specific thing: it confirms you're the genuine owner of a Steam account and returns your Steam ID to Playfull. That's the full payload — a verified ID we now know belongs to you. No password, no email, no library data, no friends list. Just an ID.

We made it part of sign-up for two reasons.

It replaces email verification. Signing in with Valve already proves you're a real account holder, so we can skip the "check your email, click the link" detour entirely. Sign-up is faster, and there's no extra password to remember.

It connects your Steam account upfront. Playfull's missions, recommendations, and achievement rewards are all built around Steam activity. When connecting Steam was an optional later step, most people skipped it — and then ran into a half-lit version of the platform. By moving the connection to sign-up, every account on Playfull has a canonical Steam ID tied to it from day one. Whether or not we end up using that connection to power your experience is a separate decision — and that's where profile visibility comes in.

Why profile visibility matters

Steam Connect tells us who you are on Steam. It doesn't tell us anything about what you play. That's controlled by a setting inside your Steam account — your profile visibility — and it's the single biggest factor in what Playfull can do for you.

If your Steam profile is public, anyone on the internet can read your game library, achievements, game stats, online state, and friends list. That's standard Steam — it's how Steam profiles have always worked. Playfull queries that same public data to power most of the experience: mission verification, library detection, personalized recommendations, the Feed knowing what you actually play, and access to most of the rewards in the Shop.

If your Steam profile is private, we get nothing beyond the Steam ID itself. Your account on Playfull is still verified and tied to your Steam identity, but we can't see what you own or what you've done. Steam-based missions can't track. Discover stays generic. Most of the rewards in the Shop will be out of reach. Your account still works for browsing, following games, and the parts of Playfull that don't depend on Steam data — but the Steam-powered parts stay dormant.

Steam also lets you set visibility per category — your library separately from your achievements separately from your friends list, and so on — if you want more granular control than the overall public/private toggle. Either way, the control lives in your Steam settings, not ours, and you can change it whenever you want.

So in practical terms, there are three states your account can sit in:

• Connected, profile public — the full Playfull experience. Missions track, library is detected, recommendations sharpen, achievement rewards work.
• Connected, profile private — your Steam identity is verified and linked to Playfull, but Steam-based features stay off until you choose otherwise.
• Not connected — for existing accounts only. Your account keeps working for browsing and following, but Steam-tied features stay locked.

All three are legitimate. The middle one in particular — connected but private — is a real option, and we want it on the table clearly rather than hidden behind a wall of defaults.

A note on data we'd store

We don't currently retain copies of your Steam data on our end — every query is live against Steam's public endpoints. If that changes in the future — for example, if we ask to store your library data to personalize your account — we'll ask for your consent first, plainly.

If you do consent, here's the practical consequence so it's not a surprise later: switching your Steam profile back to private would stop new data from reaching us, but we'd keep what we already had on file unless you explicitly ask us to delete it. Worth saying out loud now rather than burying it in a settings page later.

If your account is already here

Nothing changes automatically on existing accounts. You can keep using Playfull exactly as you do today. The enforcement at sign-up applies to new accounts only — there's no obligation to connect retroactively.

That said, if your account has felt thin on rewards or your Feed has felt generic, the most likely reason is that we can't see what you play. Connecting Steam is one click in your settings whenever you're ready, and from there it's your Steam visibility settings that decide what we can do with it.