The game in my Steam library with the most hours played is.....PAYDAY 2.
But I didn't actually play a thousand hours of it. In the late 2010s, the heat in my condo barely worked and our self-managed association refused to acknowledge it because "nobody else [was] having problems with their heat." I had all the windows plasticed up with heavy blankets literally nailed to the wall. I had to abandon the living room and bedroom entirely. I emptied the smallest room (12x10) and moved my mattress and desk in there...In addition to the playpen for my two rabbits that took up the rest of the free space.
You might be wondering what that has to do with PAYDAY 2. Well....the game revved up my video card to max on the main menu so my PC became a supplementary heat source at night...
Good times. Thanks, PAYDAY devs!
ETA: In the spring, the guy who handled yardwork noticed the flowerbed was kind of sinking on one side of the building. That's when they discovered a leak in the radiator line...small enough that 11 units didn't notice but big enough for the water pressure to not reach the farthest unit from the boiler....the unit I owned...
When I was a teen I played WoW from vanilla through Cata... Had over a full year of in game /played time on just my main.
...and I made a lot of alts.
100% full-blown addicted.
Blizzard is actually the one example of enshittification that I can actually be thankful for - I didn't really ever quit; they just stopped supplying my drug of choice. They definitely had the power to keep me enthralled, but instead shifted to a younger and younger target audience as I was ofc aging the opposite direction.
The Kung-Fu-Panda xpac trailer was finally my cue to accept that my dealer wasn't going to provide that fix anymore.
Then I
started making healthy life decisionsdiscovered Ark >_<Rimworld 2300 hours or so
Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere program have the most real playtime, but idle games have the top slots.
Terraria
STALKER and The Elder Scrolls probably hold the record. I may have wasted even more time in my life on World of Warcraft, but I feel like that doesn't count since you're just in a fucking trance for several years until you finally break away.
My list of multiple hundreds/thousands of hours include, in no particular order;
- Minecraft (unknown, been playing since browser alpha demo)
- Skyrim (600)
- Rocket League (4000)
- Fall Guys (1500)
- Stardew Valley (unknown, play multiple saves a year on different platforms)
- Vampire Survivors (400)
- No Man’s Sky (1200)
I've just about got 2,000 hours in Warframe. I tend to play a lot of different games so it's hard to get big numbers in any one game.
Steam says my top 3, in order, are ARMA3 (though more than half of that has to be with the game minimized as I work on scripts for mods), Team Fortress 2, and Rocket League. All have over 2000 hours, Arma 3 has slightly over 3k.
However, from 1997 to 2007 (literally haven't played it since The Orange Box released), I was playing Ultima Online for at least 8 hours a day, every day. So if that kept track of my play time, it would likely be numero uno. Diablo 2 and EverQuest would be right behind it.
Minecraft, and the number is still growing.
Kerbal Space program (1800.8) DCS world (1172.2) Witcher 3 (1131.5) Sims 4 (838.2) Stardew Valley (579.3)
I just wish ksp2 wasn’t a massive flop and I eagerly await KSA.
Team Fortress 2
Hard to say, but I would think Minecraft (over the last decade) then Factorio. If we’re factoring in games from when I was younger then it’s certainly COD followed by Halo then Gran Turismo.
Oblivion, Skyrim, Every Fallout (yes even 1 and 2, but especially New Vegas) borderlands 2, Diablo 2 & 3, Stardew Valley, and there were a few years of CoD, and a WoW phase.
Oh. And ten years worth of Hearthstone.
EverQuest was my jam back in the day. It ruined highschool for me. Nearly 5 straight years of farming and raids.
I wouldn't do anything different though. I met some awesome people that got me through the awkward years of high school when the internet was still somewhat new.
SteamDB says Rimworld, but I'm almost certain it's actually Fallout: NV, as the Nexus launcher at one point bypassed Steam and so those hours aren't represented. I have about 1100 hours in Rimworld, but probably closer to 3000 in Fallouts 3 and NV.
Lol I somehow completely forgot about Guild Wars 2. Pretty sure my age in that game is over 2 years of active playtime.
Fallout 4 and Skyrim
Probably League of Legends, I don‘t know how to check how many and don‘t really care, but I‘d be surprised if I hadn‘t spent more than in Rocket League which clocks in at 1100 hours. I don‘t play much of either anymore though. Counterstrike 1.6 is at 400 hours but that‘s gotta be a lie and way more as well lol
World of Warcraft - over 11k hrs
Guild Wars 2 - over 5k hrs
Warframe - 2200 hrs
Minecraft - who knows... a lot
Historically:
- XCom - Enemy within (with Long War mod)
- Kerbal Space Program
- Crusader Kings 2
- Rimworld
Overall? Probably Unreal Tournament (1999). That was when I was at the peak of my gaming time and I would play for hours most weeks and played that basically for a solid decade.
In the modern era? Warframe which Steam says I have over 700 hours in.
2000 hours in Garry's Mod, 1300 in TF2. Third place is way behind, Hollow Knight at 180.
Timberborn. 4,677 hours. I enjoy my beavers.
I have 3,400 hours in Space Engineers.
About 1,500 hours in FFXIV, 1,400 hours in DayZ, and 1,300 hours in 7 Days To Die.
Then 900 hours in Empyrion Galactic Survival, 500 hours in Baldurs Gate 3, and 300 hours in Fallout 4.
The rest are well below 200.
I have a lot of hours of Morrowind and Doom 1&2, as well as Warcraft 2 and Ultima Online, but I dunno the hour count
KSP. I colonized almost the entire system on chemical rockets alone with bases and ISRU fuel depots orbiting the smaller moons (I'd have to go to each base, do some mining, and refill the orbiting tanker station before every long mission so it's ready when I got there). I'm not at my PC but last I checked it was a couple thousand hours.
KSP
Final Fantasy XI. Something like 400-500 days, so roughly 10k hours. Though I haven't seriously played since 2011.
WoW, Grim Dawn, Don't Starve (Together), Stardew Valley, Terraria, Skyrim, Borderlands
World of Warcraft and then Final Fantasy XIV.
And it's not even close.
League of legends, Counter Strike and Warcraft 3 custom maps are waaaay up there.
Factorio is catching up though
Civilisation, the original one. Got it in the 90s, and none of my computers was without it. Even now I sometimes launch it for a guick, half-day game.
I'm sure other Microprose games from that era, in particular UFO: Enemy Unknown, are on my top 10 most played games.
From modern games, I probably spent the most time playing Civ4 and Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
No hard numbers here, but probably Medieval 2: Total War.
Every few months I get the urge to play and log more hours doing a few campaigns.
TF2, Diablo II, and Ragnarok Online. 1k-2k+ hours each.
The X3 games (Reunion/Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude) would be one game with DLC today, combined they're my only 1000hr+ game. X4 is one game with DLC and is well on it's way to that record.
Skyrim over 2000 hours easily, 400 some into Assassins Creed Odyssey and Ghost Recon Wildlands; I have no idea how many I put into Vindictus, which is an MMORPG I played for more than a decade. For phone games I’ve probably put the most time into the Kingdom Rush series, best TD out there.
Probably 2048 which is just a fidgeting toy for me.
My most played game is hands down: Borderlands 2.
995h in it!I'm approaching a thousand hours in Elite Dangerous. Quoting myself from a week or two ago:
It’s different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.
(To give an idea of the simulation’s scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what’s out there. Space is big.)
I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.
It’s an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.
One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they’re better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren’t enough buttons on a controller for everything.
I'm not sure if it's wow or League.
I played League for 10 years but in my adult phase, while wow was mostly while studying so a lot more hours to burn.
Rimworld
Guild Wars 2 has been my theme park MMORPG of choice on and off for the last 12 years, with >2500h. I have also spent ~1000h on Elite Dangerous.
According to Steam the top 3 are:
- Oxygen not included
- Civilization 5
- Factorio
But that of course does not include the games not running from Steam and pre-Steam games. So World of Warcraft is somewhere in there too. And the final Top 1 must be Transport Tycoon Deluxe (even if you don't include OpenTTD).
The Binding of Isaac
My top four on steam are:
- Garry's mod - 2800 hours
- CS:GO (CS2 now) - 2100 hours
- Terraria - 1000 hours
- Team Fortress 2 - 555 hours
I put the most hours into Awesomenauts during college... really miss games that time
Stardew Valley and Core Keeper ;)
Elite, the original one, on Commodore 64.
DotA2 and possible WoW next.
I have few hundred hours in Minecraft. And probably something like 180h in Witcher 3 GOTY. Recently I 100% Yakuza 5 with 120h on the counter, and it was (mostly) fun, because game is packed with many different minigames, so it wasn't repetetive.
steam says I played Fallout 4 for 436 hours, but that seems very high. not sure if that count is accurate.
7 Days to die. 1600 hrs on steam Call of Duty. 1200 hrs on steam
That I know of (3000+): Team Fortress 2
Probably(500+): Super Mario 3, or Apotris
World of Warcraft is the absolute winner in my case. I have no idea on actual numbers, given 99% of my time was in private servers, with a very brief stint on official. Only one of those private servers is still around, with my character from Warlords of Draenor times still there.
Outside that, probably Skyrim (many hours playing pirate versions, modding it with more lethal combat, more lore-friendly armors and "actual" civil war, among other things). I wonder how many hours I've spent on Dwarf Fortress, as I've only played the freeware version, starting with 0.34, before trees had height.
WoW, CS 1.6, Warframe, and ARK
I think something like 5k hours into Warframe, 15 years into WoW (at least 2 of my characters have 1+ year of playtime--so 17k hours just on those 2; and I max-leveled every class of character up until Battle for Azeroth) and so far, 2 years into ARK. Just over 3.5k hours of playtime between ASE and ASA.
The most that I have proof of is Europa Universalis IV at a little over 1k hours, but I wouldn't be surprised if my time on Guitar Hero 3 in high school surpassed that by quite a bit. I played a lot of Guitar Hero in high school...
Old School RuneScape, Gran Turismo 5 & 7, The Crew 1, 2 & Motorfest and I think Midtown Madness 1 & 2 are also high on my list of most played games.
DayZ, I have around 3000 hours in it.
Braben & Bells "Elite". The original one on the C64.
Team Fortress 2 easily. Been playing since 2008. It scratches an itch that no other game can scratch. Ironically though, my second favorite fps game is also TF2 (Titan fall 2)
When I played on PC more EverQuest, counterstrike, TF2, wow, Skyrim
After playing more on console ff14, elder scrolls online, pillars of eternity 1/2, and souls games (ds2, ds3, bloodborne, elden Ring)
I also like to play Indies and smaller games but those are the ones I keep going back to
I'm a bit ashamed of it, but Overwatch, I really enjoyed the multiplayer and played with some cool people I met in game. Stopped playing when OW2 released.
My second most played game is Destiny 2.
Maybe something is wrong with me...
Persona 5 Royal
150 hrs and I'm almost done with it
Elden Ring and StarCraft2
Maplestory and Warcraft 3 almost certainly hold the first two places from an age gone by, but I don't have numbers for those.
For games that I do have numbers for, Anno 1800, Stardew, and Total War Warhammer (especially if you combine the trilogy).
MMO wise, it has to be World of Warcraft. Played it nonstop when I was young.
2nd place is Oxygen Not Included.
Final Fantasy 6, because I have played through it on SNES, PS1, Rom, then SNES again.... oh, and there's 500 hours in Slay The Spire. Maybe also Civ 3.
Probably Warcraft Rumble.
That's a though one... there are more games in my library that I haven't played than ones I did.
Maybe Fallout or Neverwinter Nights. Or Silent Storm.
Yes, I'm old. And waiting for my retirement to play all of those I haven't tried yet.
Planetside 2, Arma 3, and X4 Foundations.
For me it has to be either the binding of isaac or noita. It's hard to say since i played tboi on so many devices before i got a PC.
Top 3:
Escape from Tarkov: 14600h
Elite Dangerous: 3600h
The Division 2: 3200h
XCOM: War of the Chosen
Overwatch (gave up on blizzard a couple of years ago though)
Dota 2 around 3500 hours. Rust 1100 hours. Monster Hunter World 400 hours. Binding of Isaac 350 hours.
Over time: probably Contra on the NES, Tetris and Bionic Commando on the GameBoy, Operation Wolf and Sinistar in the arcade. DOOM, Duke3d, and XEvil on the PC. CS 1.6 and CS:S in college. The Gears series on the 360.
Then I had a decade or so gaming drought. More recently: Batsugun, Ketsui (Deathtiny and Death Label), Danmaku Unlimited 3, and Battlefield 2042.
Probably counterstrike back in the day, possibly battlefield 2 including the Project Reality mod. That was back when gametime wasn't really tracked and I had a lot more spare time Possibly WoW, but I only played for a couple of years or less and for a few hours a day at most.
Currently my highest is Forza Horison 5 with like 1200 hours. Have a few others with 500+ hours although a few are inflated at least 100+ hours because the game locked up on closing and counted as played for several days multiple times.
One of the Paradox strategy games by a comfortable margin. It'll be one of the Crusader Kings or Victoria games. I've got a weekly game night with a couple of friends that was originally just CK, but has for a while now been working extremely slowly through a megacampaign. You can take the end of Crusader Kings and make it into a mod for the start of Europa Universalis, then repeat the process into Victoria and then Hearts of Iron. You need to set some rules for yourselves, because an experienced player doesn't need even a third of the CK timeline to demolish all AI threats, but the games are already good roleplaying fodder anyway so you can set rules that play into that. We're currently about three quarters of the way through Victoria
Outside of those, Noita or Deep Rock Galactic. For a while, those plus a podcast were my go-to "zone out brain off" relaxation, so the hours racked up
I would love to know for sure. I've put hundreds of hours into Final Fantasy 8, Final Fantasy X, Morrowind, and probably Halo: Reach too.
Minecraft
The Total War series, I have 300+ hours on Shogun 2, Rome 2, Empire, and Warhammer 2 each. Almost 100+ on most others. Probably have 1000+ hours on League of Legends too.
I have over 1500 cumulative hours invested in No Man's Sky and Minecraft respectively. I am a casual gamer. I started playing Minecraft in 2012 and NMS in 2017.
Dark Age of Camelot. 6000 hours on my main character, and I had more or less ten characters… I’ll never beat that amount of dedication into a game.
Terraria. I don’t know why but the progression in the game feels so damn addicting. Mods add onto it by alot too
Kerbal space program
World of Warcraft, EverQuest, and No man’s Sky
Stardew Valley, Skyrim, and Halo 3 probably top my list. I dumped like 400 hours into Stardew during Covid lockdowns and a few hundred more after
Sigh... Rust
As much as Monster Hunter is my favorite series of all time, and I have about 1600 hours combined total over several games, it's still not caught up to my total of over 2000 hours in Warframe. Love that game to bits but yeah I think I played it enough.
Most other games I play, that I played a lot, hover between 100 and 300 hours each.
I quit a couple years ago for good, but my main account on RuneScape was created in classic as a kid. I had about a year and a half of PLAY time on the account, mind you the vast majority of that was back when you had the hard 5 minute afk timer, so that was at least moderately active play. Then if you add my ironman account I have nearly 1/15th of my whole life logged into RuneScape. I don't regret it, my whole friend group as an adult stem from those friendships I made online during my young teen years. However, as a modern game as much as I have a place for it in my heart, I found I had more of a negative addictive relationship with it. Maybe I always did, but I didn't feel a negative mental effect at a young age.
I have over 1k hours in The Long Dark and 7 days to die. Around 500 in space engineers, darkest dungeon, binding of Isaac, enter the gungeon, grim dawn, and satisfactory. ~300 hours in ToME4 and Caves of qud each. That's just steam stuff though, there are a lot of games that I know are up there that aren't on steam.
I'm sure I have at least similar numbers to 500-1k if not much higher in Diablo 2-3, and I'm sure more than a few thousand in wow though I lost my og account after wotlk because I forgot the details when I quit so I'm really not sure.
R6: Siege at 1800, followed by Terraria at 1100. Terraria is the better game of the two.
Pokemon, either Pokemon Sword or Pokemon Violet, I would have to look at the Switch itself to compare, but last I looked at either one it was around 400-something hours. Shiny hunting can be a surprisingly cozy time-waster, lol.
Monster Hunter World. I usually stop playing games after I roll the credits, but I have been addicted to min/maxing in that series since Tri.
Warframe, by a big margin.
Old-school RuneScape, 12k hours, another 6k hours on rs3 pre-eoc. Over the course of 21 years.
It's either the Sims or Animal Crossing.
Factorio 5k+ atm
Unless we count pokemon, played that to death when I was younger, would be willing to say I have "young person time" amount of hours in the Gameboy versions.
Sadly as I get older I game less hours, so most of my games on this list are older. LoL, wow, Dota 2, modern warfare 2 (2009), Wingspan(online boardgame), PubG battlegrounds, counter strike 2, terraria. I haven't played fps, wow, or dota for years, but they still dominate this list. It's funny because if I made a list of my favorite games, it would include almost none of these, except terraria.
Star Citizen (no joke, I have put more than 2000h in the Alpha...). But because some people may say Star Citizen is not a game (I'm not agree with that statement), the second game I have played the most is warframe (1500h)
Easily Fallout 4 or No Man's Sky
If we're counting every Pokémon game as a single one, then that. Otherwise, probably Skyrim. I must have like 2000+ hours across all of its versions.
Sadly League of Legends, probably Skyrim next, Overwatch and Terraria
I also play FGO since the NA server released(7 years ago) but I don't play more than 20min daily
Talisman
Skyrim and Satisfactory.
I have over 3K hours on rust on PC. If I include all the hours on Xbox when I was younger it would most likely be either destiny 1+2 or Rianbow Six Siege but Im not sure how to find all that info since alot of R6 was on Smurfs
Everquest by far. Then League. Then Diablo 2. I dont think theres any game that comes close to the total unrecorded amount of hours those 3 games have.
Dayz, 3500hrs and still ticking.
Factorio: 1300h
Fallout 4: 1100hAlley Cat
Craft the world, Valorant and AoE3
