Steams hours played tab is not accurate

[mjs warlord]

As the thread title says ..... i have suspected for some time that the hours played tab for each game is not working correctly.
I currently have 4,777.6 hours logged on steam , all week i have been building new factories the leaving the game running whilst they sort themselves out.
I have a rough idea how many hours the game has been running and it think the total hours played should be higher.

 

[Pifanjr]

I think Steam only tracks hours played while you're online. Is it possible that you were offline for some of this time?

 

[Colif]

According to this, its all the time the executable is running.

Does steam count as time played if I'm afk while a game is openned? :: Steam Discussions

steamcommunity.com

But... you do need to connect to steam to update it though:

WHY doesn't steam count offline playtime? Not DO THEY, but WHY don't they? :: Help and Tips

steamcommunity.com

it doesn't collect it offline:

Because if you're offline you don't have an internet connection and there's no server-sided way to count your playtime if you change your clock or do some kind of exploit or modify some file that stores that data... There's no real reliable way to transfer offline data online and validate it.

potentially valid reason to not do it above.

 

[neogunhero]

As long as the game is open and you are connected online to Steam, it is constantly tracking your time. As Pifanjr stated, if you are set to Offline mode or don't have internet connection, Steam will not track the time. My wife and I played a good 20 hours of Split Fiction earlier this year but my PC was moved to my bedroom and I don't have wifi on it, so Steam says I've only played it a few hours.

Some newer games have a growing trend where your save file shows a more accurate number of time spent in game. Some games will even stop counting time if you are idle past a certain amount of time. I wish Steam could do that too but realistically it would be near impossible to know, unless Steam could also stop counting time after a while if no input is triggered.

 

[Zed Clampet]

As the thread title says ..... i have suspected for some time that the hours played tab for each game is not working correctly.
I currently have 4,777.6 hours logged on steam , all week i have been building new factories the leaving the game running whilst they sort themselves out.
I have a rough idea how many hours the game has been running and it think the total hours played should be higher.

It's possible that if you are launching the game through the mod loader that this time isn't counting.

 

[Zloth]

Yeah, I've seen mod startup programs mess up the hours, too.

Regarding "offline" - there's more than one of those. The "offline" under the Friends menu just means you appear offline. @neogunhero is talking about the really offline.

Steam might not track if it's down, too. I don't know exactly how it does it, though, so the system may be able to count your time spent and then update when the Steam servers wake up again.

 

[mjs warlord]

I dont use mods and i never put steam in online mode.
In recent months i have read a lot of players saying steam cloud save is unreliable so i stopped using it , i currently have almost 5,000 hours on satisfactory ...... thats 208 days continuous play if i had not gone to bed lol.
Since i stopped using cloud saves i back up the games folders onto a flash drive after every new factory is built.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I dont use mods and i never put steam in online mode.
In recent months i have read a lot of players saying steam cloud save is unreliable so i stopped using it , i currently have almost 5,000 hours on satisfactory ...... thats 208 days continuous play if i had not gone to bed lol.
Since i stopped using cloud saves i back up the games folders onto a flash drive after every new factory is built.

Steam cloud save is not unreliable unless the developers screw it up on their end. Satisfactory's cloud saves work fine and would be an additional safety measure for securing your 5000 hours of work. Nothing says you can't also backup your files if you use cloud saves. Personally, I would trust Valve's servers over a flash drive.