how do I get Steam to stop tracking my game hours?

[dynastystar]

So, I typically play my Steam Deck on my breaks at work, but I feel that doing so makes my hours with the game jump quickly. I've tried putting it to sleep and everything. Do I have to outright close the game? I would prefer not to have to do that as there are some things in some of the games for Steam Deck that take longer than 15 minutes. According to Steam I've spent 250 hours on Sonic Generations because I didn't realize that with it playing in the background that it was still tracking my playtime.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Go into offline mode.

[Mahjik]

Unless you have Friended your boss on Steam, does the tracking matter?

[davoto]

It still counts time in sleep mode? Huh, didn't know that. Valve should fix that. Not that it matters all that much, but for those of us that care about accuracy, it'd be nice. Personally, I never leave a game in sleep mode. I don't trust that crap for nothing. I've come back to a game only to find it frozen and all progress since last save lost.

[Mahjik]

Originally posted by davoto:

It still counts time in sleep mode? Huh, didn't know that. Valve should fix that.

Sleep mode should fix itself, at least that's what I see. I'll return back from sleep mode, exit the game and it will first show the total time while sleeping, but it immediately updates to remove the sleep time.

[@R+5]

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Unless you have Friended your boss on Steam, does the tracking matter?

that shouldnt matter: data can be harvested. if we feel we need or want to disable that, we should have the option, even if valve could track it anonymously. in fact, we should have more options to tweak privacy settings, and which things we want to make public or not, and change how profiles are displayed.

[Mahjik]

Originally posted by @R+5:

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Unless you have Friended your boss on Steam, does the tracking matter?

that shouldnt matter: data can be harvested. if we feel we need or want to disable that, we should have the option, even if valve could track it anonymously. in fact, we should have more options to tweak privacy settings, and which things we want to make public or not, and change how profiles are displayed.

It's part of the ToS when you sign up for an account. They don't have to offer (as of today) any option to disable it. You can make it private with your account.

[dynastystar]

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Unless you have Friended your boss on Steam, does the tracking matter?

I wasn't concerned about my boss seeing it or not, I just want my time with a game to be accurate(not a couple hundred hours extra). My boss knows how hard I work so he knows that I'm not spending 6 hours on my Steam Deck at work. Steam Deck won't even connect to the Steam Servers on the company's wifi anyways. I'll have to try to pick games that can be shut off at any time so that I can just shut the game off when my break is over.

[Mahjik]

Originally posted by dynastystar:

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Unless you have Friended your boss on Steam, does the tracking matter?

I wasn't concerned about my boss seeing it or not, I just want my time with a game to be accurate(not a couple hundred hours extra). My boss knows how hard I work so he knows that I'm not spending 6 hours on my Steam Deck at work. Steam Deck won't even connect to the Steam Servers on the company's wifi anyways. I'll have to try to pick games that can be shut off at any time so that I can just shut the game off when my break is over.

It shouldn't track it while it's in Sleep Mode (i.e. it should fix itself). However, this has been a problem with Steam forever. I have a game that says I logged 40'ish hours on it but I only played it for 10 minutes. The game crashed when I was exiting and the exe was still "running" in Windows so Steam counted it during that time.

[dynastystar]

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Originally posted by dynastystar:

I wasn't concerned about my boss seeing it or not, I just want my time with a game to be accurate(not a couple hundred hours extra). My boss knows how hard I work so he knows that I'm not spending 6 hours on my Steam Deck at work. Steam Deck won't even connect to the Steam Servers on the company's wifi anyways. I'll have to try to pick games that can be shut off at any time so that I can just shut the game off when my break is over.

It shouldn't track it while it's in Sleep Mode (i.e. it should fix itself). However, this has been a problem with Steam forever. I have a game that says I logged 40'ish hours on it but I only played it for 10 minutes. The game crashed when I was exiting and the exe was still "running" in Windows so Steam counted it during that time.

I'll try and see if Steam does fix itself on it