When you “Add a Non-Steam Game” to your library, Steam treats it almost exactly like a regular entry—except it doesn’t hook up any of the Steam-specific services (achievements, cards, Cloud, etc.). In particular:

What your friends see:
Steam will display whatever name you’ve given that shortcut in your library. So if you rename the shortcut to “SuperCoolApp,” your friends will see

> [You] is playing SuperCoolApp
…rather than the generic “is playing a non-Steam game.”



What you lose by doing this:

1. No Achievements or Trading Cards. None of the Steam-integrated unlockables or collectible cards will register.


2. No Steam Cloud Sync. Your save files won’t automatically back up to Steam’s servers.


3. No Workshop or DLC Management. You can’t subscribe to Workshop mods or buy DLC through Steam.


4. Limited Overlay Support. The Steam Overlay (Shift+Tab) can be hit-or-miss in some non-Steam executables—sometimes it won’t inject at all.


5. No Remote Play Together / In-Home Streaming. Steam’s streaming and “Invite Friends to Play” features only work with Steam-native titles.


6. No Automatic Updates. You’ll have to update the game manually outside of Steam.



What you keep (and even gain):

Playtime Tracking. Steam will still log how long you spend in that shortcut.

Friends Notifications & Big Picture Integration. Launching via Steam still fires off the usual “is playing…” status and lets you use Big Picture mode or a controller config.



Bottom line: If your goal is just to centralize all your launchers under one roof and let friends see what you’re up to, adding non-Steam games works great—and it’ll show the custom name you give it, not a generic label. The trade-offs are purely the Steam-services you’ll be missing out on, but apart from a few overlay/streaming quirks, there are no serious downsides.

Anyone wanna answer without AI? AI hallucinates too often to trust.

Anyone with first hand experience wanna chime in to confirm any of this or answer with their brain?

The answer you got is correct.

It will say that you're playing the game.

You can even add mspaint.exe and name it "Team Fortress 3", and it will say that you're playing Team Fortress 3, with "non Steam game" below it.