Why do Steam game hours have commas?

[Wolgulc]

I've been asking myself this question for years, but after searching without finding anything, I'm asking here, why are the play time times of our games made on Steam indicated in one hour point one number between 0 and 9? Knowing that this does not exist in reality. Why are they not changed to Hours, Minutes, Seconds?

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Just an old standard time keeping system to use decimals, keeping it short.

Don't get me started on hourly employee paychecks.

[Wolgulc]

They can't go back to an Hour/Minutes/Seconds system?
Because I never understood how they should count, because when you have 14.9H on a game does that mean that you've played 15 hours or more or does that mean that you've actually played 14 hours?

[rawWwRrr]

This " . " is not a comma.

[Chika Ogiue]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

This " . " is not a comma.

Might well depend on region. Remember, some European countries use a comma where the US and UK, etc., would use a dot.

[rawWwRrr]

Originally posted by Chika Ogiue:

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

This " . " is not a comma.

Might well depend on region. Remember, some European countries use a comma where the US and UK, etc., would use a dot.

Brah... context...

Originally posted by Wolgulc:

They can't go back to an Hour/Minutes/Seconds system?
Because I never understood how they should count, because when you have 14.9H on a game does that mean that you've played 15 hours or more or does that mean that you've actually played 14 hours?

Originally posted by Wolgulc:

one hour point one number between 0 and 9?

[D. Flame]

What does 12.8 hours mean?

Does it mean 12 hours and 8 minutes?

Or does it mean 12 hours and (60 minutes * 0.8), aka 12 hours and 48 minutes?

[peppermint hollows]

Originally posted by D. Flame:

What does 12.8 hours mean?

Does it mean 12 hours and 8 minutes?

Or does it mean 12 hours and (60 minutes * 0.8), aka 12 hours and 48 minutes?

It's the latter in Steam's case.

[Wolgulc]

Originally posted by D. Flame:

What does 12.8 hours mean?

Does it mean 12 hours and 8 minutes?

Or does it mean 12 hours and (60 minutes * 0.8), aka 12 hours and 48 minutes?

This is too complex, others do Hours/Minutes/Seconds well, why not here?

[Chika Ogiue]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Brah... context...

Topic title.

[Dendrobates Tinctorius]

once someone said they'd meet in half an hour but it took them almost 30 minutes to arrive. this bothers me to this day.

[D. Flame]

Originally posted by Dendrobates Tinctorius:

once someone said they'd meet in half an hour but it took them almost 30 minutes to arrive. this bothers me to this day.

"Hey, I am running a little behind, but I will be there in approximately 0.216666667 hours."

As opposed to:

"Hey, I am running a little behind, but I will be there in approximately 13 minutes."

[Kargor]

It's just a decision they made. It's entirely up to them how they display things.

Btw, Steams external APIs only give you minutes (as far as I'm aware of, anyway). So, you can't show seconds even if you wanted to. My own Steam stuff does it slightly differently than Steam, though: it shows minutes for playtimes less than an hour, hours with one decimal for playtimes less than 10 hours, and hours with no decimal at all for playtimes beyond that. I always found the decimal digit to be a bit on the ridiculous side when you get to the higher playtimes...

People often think that "precision" is better, but that's not necessarily the case. Look at an example:

[***] command> list-games bloodstained
  692850: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night; last played 2024-09-10 20:18:27; playtime 98 hours

I'm displaying 98 hours of playtime. Steam actually displays "98.4" -- but really, what kind of difference does that make? Does it tell you ANYTHING? And if Steam gave me seconds, and I'd display something like "98:24:42" -- again, what's the point?

I actually considered leaving our the seconds from the "last played", but for me that would just look weird, so I kept them. The ISO-inspired format that I'm using there just HAS the seconds, and I'm used to seeing it like that...

[Nx Machina]

Originally posted by D. Flame:

What does 12.8 hours mean?

Does it mean 12 hours and 8 minutes?

Or does it mean 12 hours and (60 minutes * 0.8), aka 12 hours and 48 minutes?

12.5 is 12 hours 30 minutes.

12.75 is 12 hours 45 minutes

12.8 is 12 hours 48 minutes

[Princess Luna]

Why is that an issue?

[D. Flame]

Originally posted by Kargor:

It's just a decision they made. It's entirely up to them how they display things.

Minutes is accurate enough, and if they gave it out in minutes it would be really easy to let players choose to display it as minutes only or as a combination of hours and minutes.

Code can very easily divide something like "34765" by 60 while leaving the remainder in minutes.

34765 / 60 = 579 with a remainder of 25, so 579 hours and 25 minutes.

A client should be able to do this in less than 1 second, and it should be able to do it locally, so there is no additional strain on the servers. Then players could just click a toggle to choose their display preference.

579 = 34765 // 60
25 = 34756 % 60