Leaving a game running in the backvround while doing other things still adds up
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 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.
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'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.
Rust can take while to load. I swear a few hundred of those hours were AFK.
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.
Leaving *Commandos" on pause when I don't play racks up hours it seems 🤷🏼♀️
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
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 😂
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.
Idle games
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Running the game servers with Steam installed can do that.
