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
- Is there a game called "My girlfriend's cock is bigger than mine"? I need that alongside with the program that farms steam hours.

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

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.
- At least half of my Elite Dangerous hours were slept through.
  What space trucking does to a mf

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 don’t think you need 1k hours to indicate games are being used as an escape. It could be a social thing where a group plays regularly and has invested time in the group and world such as Starcraft or WoW. I don’t disagree at all that games can be an escape for people with life issues, I just don’t know if hours invested is a great indicator. I’ve got over 3k in one game, but that’s mostly because it’s got quick rounds, I can start and stop between other things with no penalty, it’s been out for 4 years, and I still find it fun. The time adds up.
- I too use Skyrim for dysphoria therapy! Although my dysphoria is less intense and just linked to... gestures broadly
- Yeah, precisely this

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.
- You let your PC run through 2 weeks of vacation?
  
  It normally would go on sleep mode and be off anyway so I hadn't noticed it was on when I left. That was how I learned that the .exe would just stay running and not allow things to shut off normally when idle.
- I would hate that so much that I would get Dark Souls removed from my account.

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.
- Yeah the amount of hours I've clocked because of 1 hour of play, pause to do task, get busy and then go to bed, next day after dinner sit down to game and unpause. Bang 20 hours for 1 hour of play.
- Me and satisfactory
  
  My top two are Kerbal Space Program, at 2007 hours, and Satisfactory at 1,787 hours. And yeah, Satisfactory has its time exaggerated, as often you just got to let the factory run.
  My play time on Kerbal Space Program 2?
  17 minutes.

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.
- Do you already know you're autistic, or??
- I'm enamored at the level of data gathering. You could make some cool plots!
  
  I think I did to a point. I definitely remember writing down stuff like that. I was nerdy enough to actually buy graph paper books like you'd get at school. I'm sure I made a few graphs with coloured pens on how many times I'd played games.

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.
  
  Is it depressing if you had fun?
  I love my time on earth and I think it's wild that we can experience the intricacies of a realtime mind-battle with hundred of thousands of fellow humans around the world. #noregrets
  Now, World of Warcraft... 🤮
- I liked league, but they kept adding heros and the games always lasted forever. I think the long game times contributed to the toxicity the most. A bad team can murder 1 hour of your life.
  And I never played ranked

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.
- May I suggest Valkyria Chronicles?
  
  not huge on turn based combat, but if the sandbox elements are good i could definitely thoroughly enjoy it. I'll have to look at it sometime.
  
  +1, highly recommended. The game usually goes on sale, worth a try at least.

My friend just shared this with me:
- FFXIV released in 2013. That's ~12 years ago, which is about 105,120 hours of human existence.
  105,120/28,625 = 3.6723144104
  Meaning you've played an average of 3 hours and 40 minutes per day, every day, for the past 12 years (and that's a slight under count because the game hasn't hit its 12th anniversary yet)
  That's 5585 hours MORE than a full time 40hr/week job; nearly 3 whole years of pure labor.
  All I have to say is congratulations, you beat the hardest game there is: capitalism. Enjoy your furry weeb paradise, friend.
  
  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
- 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.

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
- Also all day while in doing chores and stuffed. That way I can jump in and out faster as I have time between tasks.
- why not put your computer to 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.
- 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 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..
- this is why we use dedicated servers my friend. You're supposed to load it into a dedicated server when you're getting to the megabase scale.

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.

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

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.
  
  Only time my pc shutdowns is for kernel updates or it crashes.
  
  I will literally go months without my PC being turned off or even rebooted. To each their own. 😂

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

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.

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.

Factorio enters chat.

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

Idle games

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.

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.

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

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

Running the game servers with Steam installed can do 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 know I guy that put Overwatch among his experiences. It was for an IT position and he contextualyzed it as some kind of acquired soft skill.
- I only have 16,000 hours on record for Eve online. it's ok I guess, not sure I'd recommend it.
  
  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 😂).
  
  That amount of work would qualify you as a master tradesman in many fields.
  A typical apprenticeship is 6-8k
  
  o7 pilot, keep those numbers up

I have over 1,900 hrs on Deep Rock Galactic.
The key is persistence.
Rock and Stone! 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
- 尺ㄖ匚Ҝ　卂几ᗪ　丂ㄒㄖ几乇
- 3500 here. Actually, the key is procrastination.
  
  Rock and stone! It never gets old oT

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'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.
- No single game is good enough to take such a big place in my life
  You obviously never played Warcraft 3 between 2004 and 2014.
  
  The level and art design of the latest expansion is amazing, but nothing compares to classic gameplay. Retail is boring IMO.
  Activision agrees and started hosting the classic servers themselves.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

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.

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.