Anon is a gamer

one of my steam friends has a program that farms steam hours, just for the shock factor
- this is considered strange behavior in my house
- Sooo Furry Hitler 2 is not as good as Furry Hitler 1?
  
  The sex scenes have fewer fetishes
- The fact that he does this is the shock factor.
  
  On the other hand I purge friends from my list regularly because I feel too shy
  Like aw no they are gonna perceive me

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.
- Yeah, my friend has this same issue. She has been playing The Sims 4 for like seven months now.
- I would hate that so much that I would get Dark Souls removed from my account.

I have like 3700 hours in factorio, but I also leave it running when I’m not around… like an idle game
- I think im around 2000 without ever leaving it idle..

In college I would study between rounds of civ and binding of isaac. These days I'll use a rougelike or stardew or something as something to do while listening to an audiobook when the weather isn't fit for biking

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.

My friend just shared this with me:
- Omg, I'll share this with them and say they have rookie numbers haha
- How ?
  
  I ask myself the same thing! I wish I had a singular game I loved as much as they love FF14
- 16009 hours for those playing at home.
  
  And still not maxed smh... I absolutely loved my time playing rs2, formed much of personality, but I could never invest that much time into a game again. 😔
  
  Love rs3,I should play my account again
  Ironman btw
- There isn't even 2k hours worth of content in XIV
  I wonder what your friend does. My guess is they're an altoholic or they just RP every day, perhaps even ERP.
  I guess some of it could be idling.
  
  Pretty shitty that you immediately assume the worst of people, just for having a game they enjoy.

Leaving a game running in the backvround while doing other things still adds up
- I have several hundred hours in PAYDAY 2 because I didn't have heat one winter and the main menu kept my room warm lol

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!
- I wouldn't be surprised if basically every person with over 1k hours in a game isn't seeking some sort of escapism, not counting the anomalies like people leaving servers running etc.
  I suppose every minute in a game is escapism of some sort, but escapism from dysphoria or something else significant, I think would be common.

I leave the game running at night while I sleep
- Also all day while in doing chores and stuffed. That way I can jump in and out faster as I have time between tasks.

The only games I have over 1000 hours in are games that I've owned for more than 10 years and are online. TF2, Counter-Strike, Arma 2 and 3, Rocket League...
I love Souls games and have played the shit out of every single one; but they average 300-500 hours of total playtime.

My steam account has just over 4000 hours logged in Dota 2, plus there's about 1000 hours sitting on another dead account somewhere.
I played the game for like 7 years, pretty much daily for anywhere between 30 minutes to... Well I did a 24 hour stream once when I finally decided to play ranked for a while. I think about that stream whenever I consider going back to the game, but the audience has changed so much and language barriers are so difficult in games like that

A typical working year is approximately 2,000 hours, just for context.
That is nuts.
- Woo, means I can officially add Warframe to my work experience (2.7k)!
- I only have 16,000 hours on record for Eve online. it's ok I guess, not sure I'd recommend it.
  
  o7 pilot, keep those numbers up
  
  That amount of work would qualify you as a master tradesman in many fields.
  A typical apprenticeship is 6-8k
  
  I only have 16,000 hours on record for Eve online. it's ok I guess, not sure I'd recommend it.
  I leveled up my Excel skill because of EVE, so that could be a legit resume entry unoe. (Not because the Overview is a giant table, I mean, I made an actual spreadsheet for Jita trading 😂).

It's me. I have numerous games like this. The answer? Alt-tab + multiple monitors + powerful PC. It's easier for me to just switch to another application and switch back when I want to keep gaming than to close the game completely and open it again... Only sometimes it's more than a day before I get back to playing again. And there's how you end up with numerous games with thousands and thousands of hours on Steam.
- More than a day?
  So you don’t shut down your Pc when done? I only ask as I always turn it off.
  
  I will literally go months without my PC being turned off or even rebooted. To each their own. 😂
  
  Only time my pc shutdowns is for kernel updates or it crashes.

Warframe is a hell of a drug.
- It's occasionally fun to hop into for a bit but I didn't really like what they did with the last update. Mainly cause I hate the drifter...

I have over 1,900 hrs on Deep Rock Galactic.
The key is persistence.
Rock and Stone! oT
- 3500 here. Actually, the key is procrastination.
  
  Rock and stone! It never gets old oT
- Did I hear a Rock and Stone?! oT
  
  If you don't rock and stone, you ain't comin' home! oT
  
  ROCK AND STONE, TO THE BONE

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.
- Do you already know you're autistic, or??
- I'm enamored at the level of data gathering. You could make some cool plots!

It's fine
- Wow that Factorio time is a lot and I’m on my way there.
  
  Cracktorio is a hell of a drug.

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.
- League quit Linux and that's when I realised I didn't actually need it anymore.. logged around 8-9 years around 1-2 games average per day can't believe we played it that long..
- I am curious how many hours I played League, but it's probably a depressing amount.

I honestly don't get it. I've been playing the same game for about three months of real time now and clocked in about 120 hours. I didn't play anything else and and it's consuming most of the time I have to myself. The game is Witcher 3.
Now, that means every 1000 hours would take me 25 months or just over two years of playing a game exclusively. Probably more since my data above includes my Christmas vacation, which was quite lengthy. No single game is good enough to take such a big place in my life. I could play so many shorter better games.
- I've got about 2,500 in L4D and L4D2. That took a solid year or more of playing non-stop, every night. Part of the reason for the divorce. In a year, that's 6.8 hours a night, every night. Fuck me, that's a JOB. Can't understand how people rack up these numbers.
- I'm playing Team Fortress 2 since 2010 and have around 2500 hours. So it's not hard to reach high numbers if the game is old enough, which some are.
  
  I put 800 hours into TF2 over the course of a summer.. I was wrongfully terminated from my job and got a good chunk of money, so I just played Hats all day every day.
  Good times.
- If I'm playing only 1 game for 3 months and it doesn't hit 500 hours I clearly wasn't playing it that much. I have a ton of spare time though.
  
  That’s an insane amount of time per day. Are you a child or without a job? That’s 5.5 hours a day.
- I'm not that big into single player games but for multiplayer I usually stick to 1 at a time. Think my steam shows a total of 10k hours over the past 12 years, with 95% of my games played there.
  With less hours played each year as higher education cost me more hours of studying.
- Not really. It depends on the game and also the individual. About 50/50 I suppose. Games like Warframe, Skyrim, Civ or generally competitive games tend to be the ones where you'd find more people with quadruple digits of playtime rather than let's say more narrowed down single player experiences (without mod support) though there are some cases for those too ofc.

Leaving *Commandos" on pause when I don't play racks up hours it seems 🤷🏼‍♀️

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.

How many hours yearly do people work?
Assume 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. That makes 2000 hours a year. So yeah, how do people pull through with this?
- Well they play for more than a year.
  
  🤯
- 1000-2000 hours in several games. It's a mix of several reasons:
  Some games are more replayable than others. My high-playtime games tend to be roguelikes, played over multiple years
  The more you play something, the more of a comfort game it gets. It becomes easier to just play it mindlessly if you just want to turn off your brain
  Some games have inconvenient save systems, intentional or otherwise (especially true for roguelikes). This incentivizes you to just leave the game running overnight instead of saving and quitting. Just once and you're looking at ~20 hours added to your playtime. Rinse and repeat for multiple nights
- As the other comment said, more than a single year. But say you spend 6 hours on a game every Saturday and Sunday. Thats 624 hours right there. If you spend 2 hours every week day, that's 520 hours (1144 hours). I have about 2000 hours in Path of Exile. It came out in 2013, but I really didn't start playing it until 2018. But I played it off and on through 2023. Or about 400 hours/year. Throw in 300 hours of monster hunter, 500 hours of elden Ring, and factorio, and some other things sprinkled here and there and you get to the 1144 hours.
  But admittedly I'm not always playing. Say I take a 15 minute break every hour. That's 221 hours I'm not really playing. Add on top of it times I take a break and forget that I left the game running. Add some time playing for days off of work, subtract more for breaks.

Running the game servers with Steam installed can do that.

Idle games

My max is csgo with 600 hrs and I'm still trash at it.

You just got to find the right game that will ruin your life.

Some like a game enough to play it for years. I wasn’t one, until I found an obscure racing combat game called “OnRush”, and have over 3700 hours in it. Can’t even get it on the PS Store anymore, but I still play it drunk now and again.

When you find that one game that you love that also has infinite replayability. Four years later your likely to have thousands of hours if you play it everyday.

Factorio enters chat.

I have around 1500 in KSP but tbf, most of that is AFK where I've had to do long manouvre burns in the multiples of hours so I've just set it and walked away lol.
- And here I am struggling to get into orbit with my duct tape and boosters. Hour long burns seem insane.

I play 2-3 hours a day and sometimes 5 on the weekends. Easily get a few 1000 hours in a year and if I like a game ill play it for years

There's an MMO I have played off and on for almost 2 decades now. I can't even imagine how many hours I've accumulated, especially back when I was a kid with nothing to do but school.
Life is so much busier and way more things demanding my time as a grown-up, and I simply cannot sit in a chair like that for any long stretch of time, I get antsy.

I got 800 hours across 3 years in a game. It was a huge time commitment. Loved every minute, until the dev team stopped outsourcing and lost their source code.
1200+ hours is a terrifying thought to current me. That’s years of concerted effort. Anyone capable of focusing on a game for so long has a screw loose.
- I'm not really an avid gamer but I've been gaming since I was around 10 which is 22 years ago. I think most games I played somewhere around 300 hours, like Borderlands, Borderlands 2, The Pre-Sequel and 3, so that adds up to about 1200 hours. I finished quite a list of rpg's over the years.
  But, I bought Rocket League in 2016 or so and since you can just casually play a game or two in between other stuff I've got over 1500 hours in. I'm not even really that good at it. I think some 100 hours would be just sitting in main menu with friends or leaving it open while going to do something else. Sometimes, I could just listen to music while absent-mindedly driving my rocket car around the field in casual.
  So what I'm saying is, time span is an important measure here. Steam should also include stats about how many hours a year people have put in on average, or per month. I think those thousands of hours for some might be put into better perspective.
  
  1500 hours in. I’m not even really that good at it
  I suck at some of the games I have a lot of time in. But that's mostly because I learned to stop caring about how good I am, and just enjoyed them.