Being the largest gaming platform in the industry, Steam allows you to purchase and play almost every game made in recent history – and then some. Whether you’re looking for the latest sequel of a triple-A, multi-billion-dollar franchise or a simple text-based indie game, it’s pretty certain you’ll find them on Steam.
With all your purchased games available for download from Steam, it’s easier than ever to start playing. And that begs another important question. How much time do you actually spend playing games?
Thankfully, Steam allows you to check that statistic.
Checking the Game Time
To be able to play the games you’ve bought on Steam, you’ll need first to install their desktop application. Being available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux, it serves as a client for downloading and installing the games you’ve purchased. Once you install it, open it and login with your Steam account credentials.
To check how much time you’ve spent playing games on Steam, follow these steps:
If you want to see the total time played on Steam, you’ll have to click through each of the games and add up the times yourself. And if you don’t feel that’s the best way around it, you can find a solution in the next section.
The Total Time
Since Steam doesn’t show the total time spent on all of your games, you can use third-party websites to get that information.
But, before you proceed, make sure that your profile settings on Steam allow these services to collect and display the game info. That means having your Profile and Game details publicly available. Here’s how to do that:
The changes you just made are saved automatically, so there’s no need to click on any “Save” buttons. Of course, you might not feel comfortable leaving your details available for anyone to see. After you finish checking on your total time, follow the above steps to change them to either “Friends Only” or “Private”.
With your profile and game details set to the Public status, you can proceed to the third-party websites to check your total time. For example, you can visit SteamGauge or SteamTime. Once there, all you need to do is to enter your Steam user ID in the required field and hit Enter on your keyboard.
SteamGauge provides a detailed overview of all available information from your profile. Besides all that, it’s interesting to check the single-sentence overview next to your profile image. For example, it may look something like this: “Over the last two years, you’ve spent 100 hours playing this selection, which includes 10 items, is valued at $100.00, and requires 100.0 GB.”
While SteamGauge focuses on the details, SteamTime’s purpose is to shame you for wasting so much time on games. Beside your total play time and the Hall of Shame beneath, it also provides numbers on these three categories: games you own, friends on Steam, and years since you’ve first registered.
A Useful Metric
Since games are a pretty attractive form of entertainment, it’s worth knowing how much time you actually spend playing them. This can help you either brag about it or make you wonder if you could’ve spent that time on something else of interest.
How much time have you spent playing Steam games? Do you find it useful to have this knowledge? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.