Greentext

one of my steam friends has a program that farms steam hours, just for the shock factor

Leaving a game running in the backvround while doing other things still adds up

Easy! Just fall asleep while trying to squeeze in some gaming before bed. Pretty sure time on the title screen or a ‘kicked due to inactivity’ notification will count towards those hours.

At least half of my Elite Dangerous hours were slept through.

i have 1200h in skyrim, 1000 of which i clocked in because as pre-teen who was yet to learn that being trans is a thing i unknowingly used it to escape dysphoria. can't feel bad if i'm spending most of my days as male cat, the chosen one at that!

Steam just tracks how long the program is running. My old rig played Dark Souls 3 24/7 sometimes because the .exe file would glitch and stay open until I manually terminated it. I averaged 168 hours a week coming back from a 2 week vacation once.

I've got a couple games with stats like that; and I do play them a lot... but I think a big slice of the time is that I often leave the game open basically all day while dipping in and out to do other things.

The play time is ticking up, but I'm having lunch, or doing laundry, or clearing the house or whatever; and I come back to the game when I'm done.

The only game I have that many hours in is because I left it open the whole day while I was working to take 5 minute breaks to play it.

I'm sorry but I want to take a slight tangent to show just how high my power level is when it comes to this shit.

I was interested in tracking my game time on my games in years well before Steam was a thing. We had a family computer and a printer.

Some are expecting an excel spreadsheet, which was absolutely possible, and I'll come back to that, but no. I was maybe 8 years old and my solution was to print off an entire page of numbers, cut each of them out individually, then every time I played a game, I'd place the next number inside the CD case.

Naïve me thought printing up to 20 would be enough, but once I went over that, I simply kept the 20 in the case and added another number inside.

Years later - in my teens in the mid-00's - I was obsessed with Pro Evolution Soccer. This is where the excel spreadsheet came in. I logged every single game, the result, the date I played the game, colour coded the results red/yellow/green to show loss/draw/win respectively, won trophies, and a bunch of other stats.

I didn't move on to Steam properly until the start of the 2010s. Since then my biggest game is 2016's Motorsport Manager, which has logged in 1720 hours, followed by Civ V which has 1122 hours since I started playing in 2017.

My current time sink is Football Manager. I have played over 500 hours in little over a year. Anyone who has played FM knows those are rookie numbers.

I quit League some half a year ago after 10 years of playing. I can see now how impossible it seems to play that consistently when you just consume different games rather than having a single title.

It's a completely different experience.

As a side note, what's up with all the people saying "I played a game", just say what game it is, we are all nerds in here.

I have something like 4k hours in Warframe.

However, many of those hours come from having been a broke teenager and wanting to sell stuff for platinum (premium currency). Any time I was home, the game was running, and I had listings up on warframe.market. Most of those hours were just me doing homework and waiting for the chat message noise.

uh, factorio just hits the neurons right, idk what to tell you.

Minecraft just hits my autism where it hurts. I'm a simple man, you entertain my neurons, and i will be happy.

My friend just shared this with me:

Got almost 5k hours between the two Ark games. About 4k of those are me playing by myself lmao

Dunno what it is but I fucking love that game

I leave the game running at night while I sleep

It's funny those 4 sets of numbers are basically my game time in ARMA II - ARMA R.

I think I have ~14,000 hours in the whole franchise since like 2003.

Rust can take while to load. I swear a few hundred of those hours were AFK.

Summary: 3k hours into World of Warcraft, Retail + WotLK private server.

I've been playing vidya since... 1992? Classic Monochrome-green machine to play CalGames on.

Ever since then, my limit for a game tended to be about 100 hours. I got 500 hours into Clicker Heroes, sure, but that game was made to be run in the background, so that doesn't really count.

It was not until I found World of Warcraft where I slowly pumped hour after hour into its massive world. I found it somewhere in 2021 - near the end of BFA. The Shadowlands beta was out, is when I started. OK sure, I played a few hours at a classmate's house back in 2005, but I don't feel that counts. Anyway, I found that there was a F2P version where I could freely try out most classes, quite a few races, and a ton of quests.

I've walked everywhere (I even tracked where I've been in a massive image of the worldmap for about 500 hours-ish?), I walked because the mounts weren't available for F2P yet, did all the quests I could, tried every race (which includes the starter zones), every class available (had an excel where I planned it all out).

I ended up with 1000 hours. 500 for my main (Human Paladin - been wanting to play that since Warcraft 2), and another 500 spread out over my 40 or so alts. Ever since I've been coming back, because with each expansion release, a little bit more content becomes available, so I racked up another 500 hours there.

In the meantime, WotLK Classic was going to release, but my income was still shit, so I found Warmane, a non-Blizzard server. You could level 7x as fast, which I did a few times, simply to learn the difference between "Classic" and "Retail".

Then it hit me. I want the Loremaster title. That meant doing a little over 3000 quests (about 99.99% of all quests in the game). But 7x made me level too fast. Luckily for me, there was a 0.5x XP option. So that's how I grinded. I did every starter zone, every regular zone, every dungeon (I was typically the "overgeared" guy of the group, since the rest was rushing through). I had fun!

That grind took me 1000 hours total. Plus another 500 for all the alts before that.

I'm pretty sure I played over 3000 hours total.

Oh, and I ended up getting my Loremaster title, as well as the World Explorer Tabbard (because I've been everywhere).

My favourite places to run around was 100% the old world. Black Rock Depths just has an atmosphere that's completely missing from TBC onwards :(

I've been thinking of playing TurtleWoW, but not sure if I can survive the Vanilla client - the WotLK one was already pretty rough 😂

Warframe is a hell of a drug.

I have like 3700 hours in factorio, but I also leave it running when I’m not around… like an idle game

Forget to turn the launcher off and your computer off a few times and it adds up.

Some people are also lucky enough to have a bullshit job and still be remote.