How Steam tracks your playtime

If you have ever looked at a game you sank a year into and seen 40 hours next to it, the number is not a lie so much as an incomplete record. Steam counts playtime in a fairly narrow way, and there are at least five situations where real hours never make it onto your account. Here is what it does and does not catch.

The basic rule

Steam records time while the game process is running and the client is connected. Your account total, the per game figure on each library page, and the "last two weeks" number on your profile all come from that same server side record.

Two things follow from this that surprise people. Idling counts, because Steam is watching the process and not your keyboard. And a game left running overnight by accident counts too, which is where a lot of suspiciously round 400 hour totals come from.

Offline play is the big one

This is the most common reason a total looks low. Steam's offline handling is inconsistent, and the safest assumption is that a fully offline session does not get recorded at all.

A long running bug report on Valve's SteamOS tracker documents the behaviour in detail. The client does show the added hours locally while you are offline, then reverts once it reconnects. If you disconnect partway through a session, Steam checkpoints the hours up to the last online segment and drops the rest, so a six hour session that lost connection at the three hour mark banks three hours. The report also describes accounts carrying two different figures at once, with one game showing 90 hours in the web library and 22 hours on the profile page.

Valve's own Steam Replay explicitly excludes offline playtime from the yearly recap, which is as close to a confirmation as you will get that offline hours are treated as second class.

If you play on a Steam Deck away from wifi, or you use Offline Mode deliberately, expect gaps. There is no way to reconcile them after the fact.

Non-Steam games

For years, adding a GOG or Epic game to your library as a shortcut got you a launcher and nothing else. No hours, no history.

That started changing in 2026. A beta client update added a playtime counter for non-Steam shortcuts, which players spotted rather than being told about. Worth knowing before you get excited: that time is stored locally in the client. It does not appear on your public profile, it does not roll into your account total, and any tool reading your profile will not see it. Treat it as a convenience counter, not a real entry in your record.

Family sharing

Hours from a shared library land on the account that did the playing, not the account that owns the licence. The wrinkle is where they show up. Shared playtime appears in your recently played and in the library, but the game will not sit in your own games list until you actually buy it, at which point the hours you already put in come along with it.

Our Steam family sharing guide covers the rest of how it works.

Hours from before Steam counted them

Steam launched in 2003 but did not track playtime from day one. The feature arrived years later, commonly dated to March 2009, and nothing before that was backfilled.

If your account is old enough, the games you played hardest are often the ones showing the least time. Half-Life 2, the original Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 in its first couple of years: all of it went unrecorded. There is no fix and no appeal. Those hours are simply not in the system.

Two more things you cannot change

You cannot reset or edit your playtime. There is no button, no support request that works, and no setting. The only thing you control is whether other people can see the number.

You cannot separate a second PC or a Deck. Playtime is account level, not device level, so everything pools into one figure. If your Deck and desktop are showing different numbers for the same game, you are looking at a sync gap rather than two separate records.

Hiding your hours instead

If the goal is privacy rather than accuracy, you have two levers. Setting Game details to Private hides your library and hours from everyone. There is also a separate "Always keep my total playtime private" checkbox that hides the hours while leaving the games visible. To hide the hours for one game only, mark that game as private, which how to hide games and activity on Steam covers. Both live in your privacy settings, and the public profile guide walks through them. Note that this is different from appearing offline, which hides your live status and nothing else.

Seeing what Steam did record

Once you know the caveats, the total is still the most useful number you have. Steam just will not show it to you in one place. The hours played guide covers where to look, and the Steam Stats tool adds up every logged hour on a public profile and ranks the library by playtime.

FAQ

Does Steam count hours played offline? Usually not. The client shows them locally, then drops them when it reconnects. A session that starts online and loses connection keeps the hours up to the disconnect.

Does Steam count AFK time? Yes. It tracks the running process, so idling, alt-tabbing and leaving a game open overnight all count.

Does Steam track non-Steam games? A 2026 beta client added a local counter for non-Steam shortcuts, but that time stays on your machine. It does not reach your profile or your account total.

Can I reset my Steam playtime? No. There is no way to reset, edit or delete recorded hours. You can only hide them.

When did Steam start tracking hours? Around March 2009. Anything played before that was never recorded and was not added retroactively.

Why do my Steam Deck and PC show different hours? They are the same account level figure out of sync, usually because of offline play on the Deck. The server side number is the one your profile and any third party tool will use.