If you dislike the What’s New Shelf on Steam, this is how you disable it. This is working as of the latest patch.
Step 1: Go to \Steam\steamui\css and open file sp.css in Notepad or better yet Notepad++
Edit: As of Aug 2023, this file has been changed to \Steam\steamui\chunk~2dcc5aaf7.css
Step 2: Find the first instance of the phrase “libraryhome_UpdatesContainer_17uEB” without the quotes. That phrase will be there multiple times so make sure you are on the first instance meaning the very first time it appears in the file.
Step 3: Place your cursor after the curly bracket { right after the first libraryhome_UpdatesContainer_17uEB. Then you press the INSERT or INS key on your keyboard. The insert key means anything you type will replace existing letters. This is very important or it won’t work.
Step 4: Now you want to manually type in the following right after the curly bracket display: none !important; Make sure you type this in manually, you can’t copy paste it or it wont work.
Step 5 : Next, just press the space bar until you reach the closing curly bracket }. It should look something like this now.
That’s it, you are done! Save the file, restart Steam and the Whats New Shelf should be gone.
Additional info and Troubleshooting
If this did not work for you and Steam keeps updating itself, that means that you did something wrong. The reason we are using the Insert key method is because we want to keep the file size exactly the same. If there is even one more or less letter, then Steam will re-download the file and overwrite your changes. By keeping the file size exactly the same is how we trick Steam into thinking that the file is correct. So just try again and make sure to follow the instructions. It’s pretty sad that things have come to this with Valve but that’s just how it goes these days.
Hope you found this useful! The original post was on reddit but that sub has gone private now to protest changes on reddit so I thought I’ll post the method here on my website. Happy gaming!
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