Steam playtime hours completely wrong

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GooseKing 31 Aug, 2024 @ 12:06am

Steam playtime hours completely wrong

This is happening for literally every game in my library, Whenever I open and close a game the playtime for that game changed usually between 2 random numbers that slowly count up, this is most noticable on Doom eternal where I left it running for a long time by accident and got like 300 hours, then closed the game and came back to 212 hours, ever since then the game will always display incorrect values. I have steam logged in on the same account on a different device, I was wondering if that might cause cloud conflicts. I also disabled cloud syncing to see if that would fix anything but there is no difference. Is there any way to fix this or will i be stuck like this forever?

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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments

Emilio 31 Aug, 2024 @ 12:08am

Are you using any card farmer programs to get cards in your games?
That is known to mess with the playtime.

GooseKing 31 Aug, 2024 @ 3:50am

No, I'm not using any card farmers in any games I play.

Kargor 31 Aug, 2024 @ 5:54am

Steam cloud has nothing to do with the playtime values.

Steam has various playtime counters, such as "playtime_forever", "playtime_disconnected", "playtime_windows_forever", "playtime_mac_forever". "playtime_linux_forever", "playtime_2weeks" . Possibly a few more.

Still, software doesn't randomly select a value -- everywhere a playtime is shown, the rules what is shown are fixed.

Now, Steam doesn't constantly update playtime while you're playing; don't quote me on it, but I seem to remember that playtime is updated every 30 minutes, or when you quit the game. Still, even with that, playtime never "goes back", and it certainly doesn't change "randomly".

Still, I don't pay attention to playtime for the most part -- I was somewhat interested in it to get the card farming working, but that's about it. Playtime shouldn't change "randomly"; however, I can certainly imagine that Steam servers might go "out of sync": playtime is not a critical value (in contrast to information whether you own a game, for example), so I would not be surprised if it can go out of sync between servers for some time, until something else (something happening on the account causing a more sweeping resync, or simply a procedure that Steam runs once a week or so because they are aware of such desyncs). Thus, I would assume that after some time, the gametime changes will stop and it will "settle" on one value.

Last edited by Kargor; 31 Aug, 2024 @ 5:57am

GooseKing 31 Aug, 2024 @ 5:43pm

I don't know, it has been like this for at least 2 months now.

crunchyfrog 23 Jan @ 9:28pm

Originally posted by pro:
Hi, if you don't mind, may I know if you've solved this problem?
I'm experiencing the same problem in a game that I have, so I'd like to know a solution. Thank you.

There isn't one.

Simply put, this has always been wonky for whatever reason.