SteamDustman

Removes hidden games from your Steam account.

This is particularly useful if you are like me and used to hoard giveaways, and have since realized how pointless that was.
However, you do need to have hidden those games in your library.

Dependencies / What You Need

• sharedconfig.vdf: this is the file Steam uses to store your categories and can be found at $STEAM/userdata/$UID/7/remote/sharedconfig.vdf, where $STEAM is the Steam install directory and $UID is your numeric Steam user ID [1]
• SteamCMD: this is Valve's command-line Steam client
• Python 3 and pip3
• The excellent Requests package, which deals with HTTP requests
• The vdf package, which deals with Valve's *.vdf files

Now, launch SteamCMD and generate a file containing all your licenses on Steam by:
$ steamcmd +login USERNAME +licenses_print +quit > licenses.txt
or:
$ ./steamcmd.sh +login USERNAME +licenses_print +quit > licenses.txt

Log in to https://help.steampowered.com/ and use your browser's developer tools to find the values to the following cookies names:

• sessionid
• steamLogin
• steamLoginSecure

Finally,
$ python3 Dustman.py <path_to_sharedconfig_vdf> <steam_lib_licenses_file> <sessionid> <steam_login> <steam_login_secure>
and your hidden games will be gone.

Logging

A log will be generated at dustman.log in your current directory. Among other things, it records all the removed packages with more than one apps.

Restoring

If, for any reason, you need to recover a removed app, you can do so at:
https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithGame/?appid=<your_appid>

Limitation

As far as I know, you can only remove an entire package (which may contain multiple apps) at a time on the Steam help center. And since that's how this script removes games, you cannot cherrypick individual apps from a package for removal. Also, given this limitation, this script will not remove packages that contain both hidden and visible games.

Warnings

Be aware that I make no promises that this script would work correctly, now or in the future. It is entirely possible that there are cases with all these undocumented resources that I have not encountered during development and failed to account for. And Valve could decide to modify the behavior of their remove-game endpoint.