Easy! Just fall asleep while trying to squeeze in some gaming before bed. Pretty sure time on the title screen or a ‘kicked due to inactivity’ notification will count towards those hours.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Summary: 3k hours into World of Warcraft, Retail + WotLK private server.
I've been playing vidya since... 1992? Classic Monochrome-green machine to play CalGames on.
Ever since then, my limit for a game tended to be about 100 hours. I got 500 hours into Clicker Heroes, sure, but that game was made to be run in the background, so that doesn't really count.
It was not until I found World of Warcraft where I slowly pumped hour after hour into its massive world. I found it somewhere in 2021 - near the end of BFA. The Shadowlands beta was out, is when I started. OK sure, I played a few hours at a classmate's house back in 2005, but I don't feel that counts. Anyway, I found that there was a F2P version where I could freely try out most classes, quite a few races, and a ton of quests.
I've walked everywhere (I even tracked where I've been in a massive image of the worldmap for about 500 hours-ish?), I walked because the mounts weren't available for F2P yet, did all the quests I could, tried every race (which includes the starter zones), every class available (had an excel where I planned it all out).
I ended up with 1000 hours. 500 for my main (Human Paladin - been wanting to play that since Warcraft 2), and another 500 spread out over my 40 or so alts. Ever since I've been coming back, because with each expansion release, a little bit more content becomes available, so I racked up another 500 hours there.
In the meantime, WotLK Classic was going to release, but my income was still shit, so I found Warmane, a non-Blizzard server. You could level 7x as fast, which I did a few times, simply to learn the difference between "Classic" and "Retail".
Then it hit me. I want the Loremaster title. That meant doing a little over 3000 quests (about 99.99% of all quests in the game). But 7x made me level too fast. Luckily for me, there was a 0.5x XP option. So that's how I grinded. I did every starter zone, every regular zone, every dungeon (I was typically the "overgeared" guy of the group, since the rest was rushing through). I had fun!
That grind took me 1000 hours total. Plus another 500 for all the alts before that.
I'm pretty sure I played over 3000 hours total.
Oh, and I ended up getting my Loremaster title, as well as the World Explorer Tabbard (because I've been everywhere).
My favourite places to run around was 100% the old world. Black Rock Depths just has an atmosphere that's completely missing from TBC onwards :(
I've been thinking of playing TurtleWoW, but not sure if I can survive the Vanilla client - the WotLK one was already pretty rough 😂
Got almost 5k hours between the two Ark games. About 4k of those are me playing by myself lmao
Dunno what it is but I fucking love that game
I've got a couple games with stats like that; and I do play them a lot... but I think a big slice of the time is that I often leave the game open basically all day while dipping in and out to do other things.
The play time is ticking up, but I'm having lunch, or doing laundry, or clearing the house or whatever; and I come back to the game when I'm done.
Me and satisfactory
My top two are Kerbal Space Program, at 2007 hours, and Satisfactory at 1,787 hours. And yeah, Satisfactory has its time exaggerated, as often you just got to let the factory run.
My play time on Kerbal Space Program 2?
17 minutes.
Yeah the amount of hours I've clocked because of 1 hour of play, pause to do task, get busy and then go to bed, next day after dinner sit down to game and unpause. Bang 20 hours for 1 hour of play.
uh, factorio just hits the neurons right, idk what to tell you.
Minecraft just hits my autism where it hurts. I'm a simple man, you entertain my neurons, and i will be happy.
May I suggest Valkyria Chronicles?
+1, highly recommended. The game usually goes on sale, worth a try at least.
one of my steam friends has a program that farms steam hours, just for the shock factor
this is considered strange behavior in my house
Sooo Furry Hitler 2 is not as good as Furry Hitler 1?
The sex scenes have fewer fetishes
The fact that he does this is the shock factor.
On the other hand I purge friends from my list regularly because I feel too shy
Like aw no they are gonna perceive me
Rust can take while to load. I swear a few hundred of those hours were AFK.
Steam just tracks how long the program is running. My old rig played Dark Souls 3 24/7 sometimes because the .exe file would glitch and stay open until I manually terminated it. I averaged 168 hours a week coming back from a 2 week vacation once.
You let your PC run through 2 weeks of vacation?
It normally would go on sleep mode and be off anyway so I hadn't noticed it was on when I left. That was how I learned that the .exe would just stay running and not allow things to shut off normally when idle.
Yeah, my friend has this same issue. She has been playing The Sims 4 for like seven months now.
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Leaving a game running in the backvround while doing other things still adds up
I have several hundred hours in PAYDAY 2 because I didn't have heat one winter and the main menu kept my room warm lol
i have 1200h in skyrim, 1000 of which i clocked in because as pre-teen who was yet to learn that being trans is a thing i unknowingly used it to escape dysphoria. can't feel bad if i'm spending most of my days as male cat, the chosen one at that!
Yeah, precisely this
I too use Skyrim for dysphoria therapy! Although my dysphoria is less intense and just linked to... gestures broadly
I wouldn't be surprised if basically every person with over 1k hours in a game isn't seeking some sort of escapism, not counting the anomalies like people leaving servers running etc.
I suppose every minute in a game is escapism of some sort, but escapism from dysphoria or something else significant, I think would be common.
I don’t think you need 1k hours to indicate games are being used as an escape. It could be a social thing where a group plays regularly and has invested time in the group and world such as Starcraft or WoW. I don’t disagree at all that games can be an escape for people with life issues, I just don’t know if hours invested is a great indicator. I’ve got over 3k in one game, but that’s mostly because it’s got quick rounds, I can start and stop between other things with no penalty, it’s been out for 4 years, and I still find it fun. The time adds up.
A typical working year is approximately 2,000 hours, just for context.
That is nuts.
Woo, means I can officially add Warframe to my work experience (2.7k)!
I know I guy that put Overwatch among his experiences. It was for an IT position and he contextualyzed it as some kind of acquired soft skill.
I strongly believe that video games are underappreciated in just how much they help us develop certain skills.
I'm talking long-term planning, resource distribution, tactics, hand-eye coordination, teamwork, skillset comprehension and task allocation based on it, language skills, interpersonal skills (ironically), and can even serve as a font of self-knowledge if one dives deep enough!
Yea, no. It surely has some positive, just like pretty much anything. But if you look at it as something you do instead of something else, you start accumulating a lot of negatives.
There's no way any fine motor skill is somehow more developed than, say, playing almost any sport, that involves more than just two hands, and a similar thing can be said as far as teamwork and resilence goes.
On the fantasy side you have to compete with reading or, more broadly, studying.
It probably wins against binge watching b-rated tv series or idlessly watching TV, but if you get the wrong tytle you won't bring home that much value. (Say you are stuck playing COD on a loop).
I think an healthy varied diet of activities and stimuli is still the way for getting the best out of life.
A study once showed that pro gamers did actually have better reaction times than professional athletes of other types.
As far as the other stuff in their list, though, games are too shallow to have any weight towards experiencing the real life equivalent of their themes.
I respect your opinion, and the fact that it differs from mine:))
I think it very much depends on the game. Some reflex-based games most certainly compete, same with a lot of team-based games and story-focused ones. Some even excel at this, it all depends on the intention behind them. I can personally say that having played a lot of strategy and management games has helped me to develop palpable planning and management skills, of which I've made ample use while I held a Project Manager position, as an example.
My teenage years were spent in Warcraft III. I sucked at it, I'm terrible at multitasking.
It could very well be that you were already good at that and that translated both into enjoying strategy game and succeeding as a Project Manager.
Well, there ya' go! I still suck at Warcraft III, and not for a lack of trying!:))
Maybe you do have a point about having predilections for certain skillsets, but I can say with certainty that I've never aced a game the first (dozens of) time I picked it up. But they helped me narrow down my thinking in terms of priorities, they helped me develop a "nose" for strengths and shortcomings in someone's skillset, they basically taught me what the practical side of management entails.
Same with long-form sim games, those taught me how to plan for the long-term, how to form contingencies, how to deal with the unforeseen, etc.
they helped me develop a “nose” for strengths and shortcomings in someone’s skillset
In an actual human being? What kind of game are you thinking about here?
Well, pretty much any RPG - used to play a lot of Neverwinter Nights, developed an addiction to TES and Fallout 3/NV just like everyone else, dipped my toes in the classic Fallouts in high-school, and it just kept growing from there.
In addition, a lot of well-made RTS/management/sim games [Warlords Battlecry III, Stronghold, Stronghold Crusader, 40k: Dawn of War (the first and second batches, I devoured them as they came out, but III is... no), the C&Cs, several Total War titles, StarCraft, the SpellForce series, Age of Empires, the classics, pretty much], also taught me the importance of unit/team composition, which, to me, is an abstractised and simplified way of keeping track of such aspects. They don't teach everything which one should keep in mind, but they sure taught me to keep an eye on skills in general.
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The only game I have that many hours in is because I left it open the whole day while I was working to take 5 minute breaks to play it.
I have over 1,900 hrs on Deep Rock Galactic.
The key is persistence.
Rock and Stone! oT
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My friend just shared this with me: 
FFXIV released in 2013. That's ~12 years ago, which is about 105,120 hours of human existence.
105,120/28,625 = 3.6723144104
Meaning you've played an average of 3 hours and 40 minutes per day, every day, for the past 12 years (and that's a slight under count because the game hasn't hit its 12th anniversary yet)
That's 5585 hours MORE than a full time 40hr/week job; nearly 3 whole years of pure labor.
All I have to say is congratulations, you beat the hardest game there is: capitalism. Enjoy your furry weeb paradise, friend.
I appreciate the praise but it belongs to someone else
My most played is 250 hours for a game from 2008
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