My Played Hours Are Wildly Exaggerated

[cowheads]

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere. Many RimWorld reviewers show hundreds or thousands of hours of play. I bought it three days ago and Steam is claiming I have already played for 17.8 hours. Nope. Not even close. Maybe 3 or 4, maximum. Is it possible that the game and/or Steam exaggerates the hours played by other people too? Is there a better explanation? I'm truly puzzled.

[Triple G]

17.8 hours in three days seems normal. It´s 5.9 hours per day. Usually i have around 200 - 220 hours in two weeks when i´m at it - which are 14 - 15 hours per day. While it´s not like that. I rather play 36 hours, and then sleep 24 hours. Normal gaming sleep rhythm.

Conclusion:
17.8 hours is less than a day. 53.4 hours - so three times the amount is appropriate for three days.

At one point in time a gamer has to make a decision. Do i want to play games? Or do i want a job and social life, a career, money, and traveling the world? True gamers have only one answer to this question.

[Astasia]

There's a generally rare issue where if you close the game at like the same frame a sound effect is trying to play the game can get stuck in a loop where it logs the error of the sound effect trying to play endlessly, or until it fills up your entire drive with like a 100gb log file. The game would continue to run for that duration, and just appear to be frozen, but steam would in theory count that as time played. If you have a habbit of telling a game to close then walking away from your PC without checking if it actually closed, then that may have happened to you.

Otherwise, no. The game is just highly addictive and it's easy to lose track of time while playing.

[Bosh]

I have played over 6500 hours. Your 17.8 hours are utterly meaningless.

[Narrowmind]

Originally posted by cowheads:

I'm truly puzzled.

Is this what you have to do to save your job, your marriage, and keep your children from abandoning you? Look, there's no shame in enjoying the games you love, but all of us have to know when to turn the system off. You could potentially starve to death waiting for the "perfect" stopping point.

SHAPE UP!

[Steelfleece]

Leaving the game open at the menu, or paused, counts. I'll admit a non-insubstantial chunk of my hours was probably spent at one or the other.

[cowheads]

Thanks to everyone for your entertaining replies. I believe Steelfleece's suggestion is probably close to the mark; I probably left it on pause for a long time. I also understand now that I'll need to tell my wife she should not expect to see much of me for the next few months or years. Sucks, but you've gotta have priorities.

[Narrowmind]

This is the way things must be.

You've made the right decision. If your family was right for you, they'd have their own rigs and be playing alongside.

[someonesneaky]

It's technically not played time, it's run time.

Leave the game open to go make dinner or coffee or run to the bathroom, click to run the game but forget about it in the background and go to bed hours later, have it paused in the background while you chat with a friend, spend ages sorting your mods or trying to roll that perfect pawn or find the right map seed - it all counts toward that timer.

[someonesneaky]

Originally posted by Bosh:

I have played over 6500 hours. Your 17.8 hours are utterly meaningless.

At one point, you also only had 17.8 hours. We all were new, we all had to start somewhere.

[jodnus]

I'm an alt-tabbing afk'er, so my time is inflated in a lot of games.

[Teacup]

This is simply how it starts. Give it a few hundred more hours, you'll eventually move from treating the game like a GAME to treating it like a Geneva conventions checklist simulator

[. -.-. .-.. .. .--. ... .]

Well i just started the Game and now it shows 5,9 hours on record. Only did the Tutorial.

Wait... It is 7am... Welp, guess the Tutorial was in depth.

[cinless]

I try to always close games when I'm not actively playing them to avoid this kind of inflation, however even with this in mind I am still approaching 3k hours on Rimworld.
This game's just somethin else.

[Elvi]

It's not a Rimworld thing, Steam simply tracks the amount of time the software is running, for any given game, doesn't matter if you are playing it or even at the computer.

But it will get worse, because eventually, you'll start noticing this in real life too. You run Rimworld for a couple minutes and suddenly it's 4:30AM Monday.