Steam’s new screensavers with animated artwork from your library

[u/Alyenax]

Steam recently added custom screensavers to Big Picture and SteamOS Gaming Mode. That gave me the idea of having animated SteamGridDB artwork from my library playing while Steam is idle.

Steam Animated Screensaver lets you pick games, choose their animations and install them into Steam. You can prepare a bunch of games at once, change the artwork, add a cover next to the title and keep the original framing or crop to 16:9 or 16:10.

Steam handles playback itself. Once everything is installed, you can close the app and the screensaver works offline. No Decky needed. You’ll need your own SteamGridDB API key to download the artwork.

After installing it, open Big Picture, go to Settings → Customization → Screensavers and select it there. This is a screensaver for Steam, so Steam needs to stay open in Big Picture or Gaming Mode.

There are builds for Windows, Linux, Mac and SteamOS. I’ve mostly tested it on my Steam Machine and MacBook Air, so I’d really appreciate some feedback from Windows and Linux users. The video was recorded on the MacBook Air.

Contributors are welcome too. Animation smoothness could use more work, especially with SteamGridDB artwork that already looks choppy before you put it on a big screen.

GitHub and downloads

PS: The music is “Song Of The Forge” by Scott Buckley

[u/peoplehatei_trepan]

Can’t wait to see my favorites!