The Steam scanner that tells you the truth about your library

I've been sitting on an idea for a while now, one of those ones that seems obvious in retrospect but took an embarrassingly long time to actually build: what if you didn't have to sign up for anything to find out whether your own game library respects your time?

Every other tool wants an account first. Connect your Steam, verify your email, agree to the terms, and then we'll tell you something useful. I get why - it's how you build a user base. But it always felt backwards to me. You should get the value first, and if the value is good enough, signing up should feel like the obvious next step rather than a toll booth.

So that's what the Steam Library Scanner is. Paste in a Steam profile URL (or just a username) - yours, a friend's, whoever's - and it goes through the whole library and hands back a verdict. What percentage of what you own actually fits into a 30-minute window on a weeknight. Which games are pausable and which ones will punish you for stepping away. A backlog translated into hours-to-beat instead of just a scary number of unplayed titles sitting there. And, my favourite part, "tonight's picks" - five games you already own, ranked by what's actually going to work for the time you have.

There's a companion piece to this that I didn't expect to enjoy building as much as I did: the "worst offenders" section. It's exactly what it sounds like. The games in your library least suited to how you actually play. Somewhere between diagnostic and mildly humiliating, which I think is the right tone for something like this.

We recently expanded the report itself. Tonight's Picks now leans on recency and what's trending, not just a static score, so the recommendations feel less like a stale list and more like something a friend with good taste would actually suggest tonight. There's also a "most played" callout now - the one game where you've sunk an absurd number of hours despite needing 60-minute blocks you apparently never have. It's a bit of a roast, honestly. People seem to enjoy being roasted by their own data more than I anticipated.

The backlog card got sharper too - it'll now tell you how many games you've bought and genuinely never launched, which is its own special kind of admission. Nobody asked for that number to be surfaced quite so plainly, but here we are.

None of this touches your account. It's a read-only look at your public library - nothing gets written, nothing gets saved to your profile unless you choose to sign up afterward, at which point your scan just becomes your actual library on the site instead of a one-off report. That was important to me. A tool that respects your time shouldn't start by asking for a commitment.

If you haven't run your own library through it yet, it's linked right in the header. I'd genuinely like to know what your worst offender turns out to be - try it at sessionpick.com and see what your library's actually been hiding.