I personally make a guess depending on certain games as to how long I've played them. I've definitely lost track of how long I've played certain games ( especially on console ) like Borderlands or Sonic Unleashed on xbox360. Especially since I never wrote any of that kinda stuff down in middle/high school because I didn't care how long I had been playing in total.

Though, I will say that I like and dislike how Steam tracks your progress in playing games. I was roughly 4-6 minutes off of playing for 2 hours in order to buy some game related account themes but now I'm 2.7 hours in accoring to them because I ended up leaving it on in the background. In the future, I'm not gonna remember I did that, so I'll assume I actually played all that time. There's no nuance in their monitoring. If the game runs, so does their meter of how long it's been on, regardless of you playing or not.

Though, I assume a good solution would be using any form of note taking program and jotting down your play times and dates and any other notes you want. Or using a spreadsheet with that same information. As long as you don't lose that/those file(s), depending on what solution(s) you choose to take, it should be fine as long as you actually remember to do it and aren't lazy about that, like I would be.

At the end of the year I look at the Steam Year in Review overview.

Steam is where almost all my games are and i'll have it sorted into a Not Played, Playing, Completed, and 100% category. Recently i've started trying to look into NeoDB though for things i can't add to steam (Like PS3 games)

Obsidian is my main notetaking app, so I use the kanban plugin to keep a list of games I'm playing, plan to play, and finished.

Reading the comments - am I the weird one for just remembering?

My Steam library. I have everything categorized and keep them in a category until I have played and completed them to my satisfaction.

I do the organizing with categories/tags in game libraries that supports it; want to play, playing, beaten, given up, unbeatable.

I also have something similar in Playnite, though I don't love that program.

I also love notebooks, I keep a notebook around for writing in during games, and I set up lists for each year with a column for bought games and one for played games. With this I can see what games I have played since 2016/17 or thereabout.

I love statistics, and seeing when and for how long I played a game is fun.

I don't. If I played a game and then forgot about it, then i get to play it again at a different stage in life. It's a whole new experience! Why would I want to miss out on that?

I use Questlog and playlists to actually see what I've started/completed/paused/dropped and in which year happened

HowLongToBeat.com

Helps me keep track of which games I've played and which games I own on which platform to avoid double-buying.

Going forward? RetroAchievements, Steam, GOG, and LaunchBox to tie it all together. PSN trophy integration to LaunchBox would be cool too, because PS3 stuff is never coming to any of those platforms and I have history there, too.

For historical stuff, that's in my memory exclusively.

I've been using obsidian notes for a lot of things. I have a kanban board there that goes buy->bought->in progress->finished->100%

The last step is pretty useless because I never even want to 100% a game. I should remove it. The main use for the board is so when I haven't played anything in a long time, I can look and go "oh, I had that one going" and pick it up instead of starting some other new game.

I don't, my favorite games have a way of leaping out of my memory or my life and latching onto my face to remind me I love them. I guess I forget the others.

I've started to use Playnite. It's nice to have a complete catelog of all my games. Most of my real games (ie ignoring random freebies) are on steam, but I've collected a bunch elsewhere like gog, epic, humble bundle, and others. You can give it credentials and set up nearly all the major catelogs so that it can generate a listing of all games you own.

I use it to mark when I completed a game, but I've only had it for a couple years, so I generally go by memory or by steam statistics of hours played.

Downside is that it's Windows only. It's open source and free, and I still have a windows machine for most of my gpu games, but I mainly game on my steam deck or my Linux laptop these days, so I need to find another option or see if Playnite is wine/Proton compatible.

I find this post interesting. Are you asking because you're curious about statistical information like "you played this game 28 hours more than that game" or just so you remember if you liked a game or not?

I understand the first one, but I can't even comprehend the second. As soon as I see a screenshot from a game, my brain goes back to playing it and the general emotions it triggers. I might not remember the details about the game, but I'll remember if it was fun, frustrating, boring etc. So I think it's really strange that someone could completely forget playing a game.

I don't mean any offense or anything. I know I'm some kind of neurodivergent, and I find the differences in how we each think very interesting.

I've started rating games I finish, or didn't like enough to finish, in backloggd.com

I do the same for movies and tv series on a different website, too.

I've been using backloggery.com for more than 15 years.

It's a simple, manual site, but I think that's also its main strenght - I've had too many issues with other sites where I wanted to add a niche game I played but it was not in their databases, inconsistent naming between games in the same series, no ability to add duplicates when I occasionally double-diped on a game and so on.

It has all features I need - you can add reviews, notes, track priorities, wishlist, borrowed games, make custom lists, get stats... it's also community supported with no ads.

The site was a bit stale without development for a while, but Drumble (the owner) finished a major rewrite last year and started developing new features again. You can check his profile here for an example.

I've been using Launchbox, especially since I play emulator games. They've improved the efficiency of large libraries and added support for RetroAchievements, although I manually toggle completion status since I don't always use it to launch my games so the time tracker isn't accurate.

More importantly it let's me hit randomize, so if I'm feeling adventurous it'll pull a game from my backlog I might have got from anywhere.

I don't intentionally use it to keep track of the games I've played but I've been using GameFAQs to keep track of older console games I have not yet played. It's not perfect for this as I need to use documents to keep track of some additional information but I have yet to find a better alternative.

For PC games, some of the platforms I use, like GOG and Itch, actually have built in features to help me to keep track of what games I haven't played yet. For the others (and mobile) I still have to use documents to keep track of this as well.

Some people use categories in their steam library, but it would be nice to have something else to track it all.

I keep a list in a plain text file. It has sections for each year and one section for games I'm interested in. The list used to be on paper and I'm considering going back to that.

https://www.backloggery.com/ might be the least modern looking game tracking site, but it’s the only one I found which gives you a yearly breakdown of your started and beat games, that’s way I use it.

I use backloggery.com, but I see a lot of people using backloggd.com these days. Backloggery is a bit more old school and relies a lot on manual entry, so I'm sure some of its competitors are better about linking up to things like your Steam account. You can also track a lot of this stuff on HowLongToBeat.com, which is mostly seeking to answer the question in the URL but also lets you log a review of the game, etc.

I have all games I have completed on Steam in Hidden, all games I‘ve never played in its own list and all games I have started in its own list. If I start a game I move it from one list to the other and same when I‘ve finished one. Only works for Steam stuff obviously. But I play 95% of my stuff there so that‘s good enough for me.

I've only played one game since 2005.

Not a complete list, but I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the games I bought but then never or barely played to try to get me to revisit them in some organized way. Outside of that, there's just the steam library. Anything further back from my time playing on consoles is kind of just lost to time and memory unless it was a particularly memorable game.

I game exclusively in Linux (and I play on GOG and Itch), so I just use Lutris categories for this. Of course, I made a Lutris account and turned on sync

I just started a checklist in Joplin, gonna make a new list for each year.

I use Gamebrary because it's FOSS, so I suppose you could in theory clone the repo and self-host it, but IDK how self-hosting ready it is.