How do some users have over 1 million hours playtime?

[Nightweaver20xx]

That's actually temporally impossible, because that's longer than the lifespan of a human (114 years). The highest playtime on Steam Ladder is 1.7 million hours! That's 195 YEARS! Somebody explain this to me.

[The HopelessGamer™]

They cheated. Simple. There are ways of spoofing pretty much anything on steam.

[MalikQayum]

the more games you have + the powerful your pc is, the more games you can "launch" so you could launch 3000 games for 1 hour that would be 3000 hours. do that for 24 hours and then 7 days and you should hit around half a million hours.

you don't actually have to install the games, as you can use tools that will run idle games that are not installed that you own.

[Radene]

Well, as we keep repeating in these forums, "playtime" is an irrelevant number.

[XanDer-XTX]

There are third-party tools that allow you to have that big amount of hours.

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

They cheated. Simple.

^
Basically this, people love something to brag about when in reality nobody cares for such a thing.

[Radene]

Originally posted by XanDer-XTX:

There are third-party tools that allow you to have that big amount of hours.

Originally posted by The HopelessGamer™:

They cheated. Simple.

^
Basically this, people love something to brag about when in reality nobody cares for such a thing.

All the "ability to review should be limited by playtime" threads suggest otherwise.

(And yes, then is when I keep saying that playtime is irrelevant)

[wuddih]

you can not make Steam recognize 3k games running.

Steams backend can safely handle up to 32 games at the same time being their playtime recognized. anything more and it might bug out.
32 x 24 = 768 hours per day.
x 14 = 10752 hours per 2 weeks (that is the most you will find on recent playtime on a profile)
or
x 365 = 280320 hours per year
and you will have your million hours played in about 3 1/2 years.

and you PC does not need to be any powerful. you do not need to start the actual game. Steam just needs to know the game is running and you can simply tell it what is running.

this is neither "spoofing" nor "cheating". the premise for malicious intent or gaining benefit is not given, there is no designed competition for playtime. this is "simulating running games on Steam".

simulating running games has been a thing since Steam community profiles were very basic and this:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_rating
was the only indicator of your playtime activity.
playtime back then was not recorded or saved per game, it was general and not saved for longer than rolling 2 weeks, also buggy. per game and saved came later.

as other said, playtime is pointless. if people take it up for competition on external sources is not relevant.

[Start_Running]

Time travel.

[Apathetic]

Originally posted by wuddih:

you can not make Steam recognize 3k games running.

Steams backend can safely handle up to 32 games at the same time being their playtime recognized. anything more and it might bug out.
32 x 24 = 768 hours per day.
x 14 = 10752 hours per 2 weeks (that is the most you will find on recent playtime on a profile)
or
x 365 = 280320 hours per year
and you will have your million hours played in about 3 1/2 years.

and you PC does not need to be any powerful. you do not need to start the actual game. Steam just needs to know the game is running and you can simply tell it what is running.

this is neither "spoofing" nor "cheating". the premise for malicious intent or gaining benefit is not given, there is no designed competition for playtime. this is "simulating running games on Steam".

simulating running games has been a thing since Steam community profiles were very basic and this:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_rating
was the only indicator of your playtime activity.
playtime back then was not recorded or saved per game, it was general and not saved for longer than rolling 2 weeks, also buggy. per game and saved came later.

as other said, playtime is pointless. if people take it up for competition on external sources is not relevant.

this even with running all the games you can it takes a ♥♥♥♥ load of time. Most people end up doing it but running afk games along side the real game they are playing.

[GamerXT]

Originally posted by Radene:

Well, as we keep repeating in these forums, "playtime" is an irrelevant number.

People find competition in anything, regardless how useless it is. Basically anything with a number that increases

[Nightweaver20xx]

Well I mean that's basically why clicker games exist.

[GamerXT]

I never knew there was a page that showed who had the most play hours either, that`s just asking people to do anything to be at the top, to certain people, that`s a score board.

[Alucard †]

Vampires and other immortal beings also use Steam.

[Radene]

Originally posted by gamer:

Originally posted by Radene:

Well, as we keep repeating in these forums, "playtime" is an irrelevant number.

People find competition in anything, regardless how useless it is. Basically anything with a number that increases

Well yess that's why we have a Guinness record for the longest hair in the world.

But it's still irrelevant.

[B l u e b e r r y P o p t a r t]

People just idle hours, it's not hard and most people that have over 1m already were those that were able to run more games than the 32 limit now.

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Time travel.

Pretty much, I love being a time wizard.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Time travel.

^This, Morty McFly just forgot he left his game running all that time, and came back to the present, and realized he left it running the whole time, I think we all had that moment.

But for real, it's just spoofing their playtime by using 3rd party Software that tells Steam you're playing, so & so, and that's about it.