How is Game Time Played calculated?

[shortwind]

It doesn't really matter, but how does steam calculate time played for our owned games. Many games show only a few minutes played even though I've put in tens or hundreds of hours. Other games just seem to stop calculating my hours played. Is this a known simple issue?

[WoogieMonsutā]

Originally posted by shortwind:

It doesn't really matter, but how does steam calculate time played for our owned games. Many games show only a few minutes played even though I've put in tens or hundreds of hours. Other games just seem to stop calculating my hours played. Is this a known simple issue?

It simply measures how long the .exe is active in your processes. If you've been playing with the Client in Offline Mode, it stops. Otherwise, I don't know what would make it stop if you are not in Offline.

[Xaelath]

Originally posted by Ojisan Kukkī:

Originally posted by shortwind:

It doesn't really matter, but how does steam calculate time played for our owned games. Many games show only a few minutes played even though I've put in tens or hundreds of hours. Other games just seem to stop calculating my hours played. Is this a known simple issue?

It simply measures how long the .exe is active in your processes. If you've been playing with the Client in Offline Mode, it stops. Otherwise, I don't know what would make it stop if you are not in Offline.

It seems it also affect achievement for offline mode especially for unstable connection.

[BossGalaga]

It even counts an open game launcher (before the game itself is even started) as playtime.

One thing to note, Steam didn't introduce playtime tracking until March 2009 I believe, so any games you played before that may not show your true hours played.

I've played thousands of hours of CS, CSS (CSGO not as much) and TF2 but sadly they're not registered.