Giving Up On Game Time Tracking

Posted on by Nimgimli

I guess it’s only been a few days, but I feel like I’ve been chasing my tail in circles trying to figure out a way to track the time I spend playing games in a way that Krikket and Naithan do. I feel like I’ve spent more time futzing around with quantifying my gaming than I have actually gaming.

Kevin Brill’s TempusGameIt is excellent if you’re primarily a PC gamer who focuses on Steam games, but it currently seems to have trouble when a game is being launched from an alternate service like Amazon Games or Xbox Game Pass. I’ve made Kevin aware of this and I’m sure he’ll sort it out but for now given that a lot of my PC games come from Game Pass it is missing a lot of my sessions. (Tempus is free and Kevin is building it in his spare time so bless him for giving us such a great system for Steam and other ‘traditional’ PC launcher games!)

I started looking for alternatives but either they were subscription based (and I don’t care enough to spend money every month to do this) or they were open source products that worked but had interfaces that only a tinkerer could love. ActivityWatch is a good example. It DOES work but I couldn’t find an easy/apparent way to tell it not to track when I was using a browser or discord or something, which meant I had to do some heavily filtering since I’m on this system for 8 hours a day for work. If I was in a tinkering mood I’m jump in and figure this out but I just want something that works.

I am still using Playnite which I LOVE as a launcher and a choice paralysis breaker. It does do tracking with an add-on that gives me a rough idea of what I’ve been playing most frequently, at least. The image at the top of this post is a Gantt chart showing what I’ve been playing. In the app I can roll over those boxes and see how long each session was but I can’t seem to find a way to total them up. [If this was a “live” view of the data you’d see most of the sessions are like 10 minutes long.. I’ve been kind of distracted by all of this. I boot a game, play for a few, then quit to see what data I got.]

And then there’s the question of console games, which I also play. Playnite at least shows I’ve played console games. The 3rd item down, Fallout 76, is the Xbox version. But it doesn’t show time played, and of course none of the PC-based general purpose time trackers will be able to see how long I spent on consoles, so I’m never going to have an accurate figure.

I don’t even know why I WANT this info! I just got it stuck in my craw that I wanted to put charts and graphs in my monthly recap because they look cool!! But at this point it’s all kind of becoming a drag. What I need is Raptr! Whatever happened to Raptr??! But really the chart up there is a good refresher of what I played (which apparently is a LOT of different stuff lately.. won’t fit all of that in the recap.)

Anyway… I’ve been trying to keep to writing at least 2 blog posts/week but I’ve been spending so much time on tracking software (and streaming software, but that’s a different post) that I have hardly been playing any games, so I have nothing else to talk about!!!

10 thoughts on “Giving Up On Game Time Tracking”

    1. I actually looked at ManicTime because on one of your posts you mentioned that was what you used, but I didn’t see a free version. I wonder if they’ve dropped that now? I saw a $7/month version and a 1-time $67 version. Maybe if I just download it the “free trial” converts to an unadvertised free version or something?

          1. Just came to chime in same as Krikket; using ManicTime still and the free version is still a thing (you can even say ‘No’ to the trial version and stop the extra faff from coming in and just stick to the standard free one).

            There is nothing in the Pro version I would want, but I’ve been using it so long if they had a reasonable low cost one-off payment option, I’d toss them some coin for the value I’ve got out of it, but it’s subscription only.

            The downside for you on this one maybe is that it doesn’t just track games — it tracks everything. Which I recognise is also a benefit, in that it doesn’t make you sign in or worry about which game launcher is doing what, but it will get browser, work stuff, whatever you might be doing on the PC.

            So while it does have some really basic charting capability in the tool, I (and I believe Krikket as well) do the data collection and graphing in a separate Excel sheet. It doesn’t take long to update, and I only do it once a month for the Journal post, so it isn’t a high degree of extra effort, but still.

            And finally as Krikket already noted, yeah, nothing captured on the console side — it’d be PC only, but then that is probably going to be the case across the board for any tool here.

            Whenever I do capture PS gaming time, I do it by way of checking the length of played time on the Save, and then the delta between last number and new number across months. If a game doesn’t let me know the save played time though, I’m basically screwed for that game. xD

          2. I think we’ve reached as deep in responses as WordPress will let us go, but this is aimed @Naithin

            So yeah, this blog post is a big fat lie after Krikket pointed out that ManicTime did have a free version. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days and practicing exports and imports and chart making in Excel, which you’ll see if you pop into Mastodon where I was talking about it.

            And yeah I’ll just have to suck it up when it comes to console games.

            And in another note, I tried Coral Island tonight and wow you weren’t kidding about it being similar to Stardew Valley, but it’s been a while since I played Stardew so that’s fine. Only put in an hour or so but liking it so far, so thanks again for posting about that!

  2. I use Procrastitracker, but I won’t recommend it due to your “but had interfaces that only a tinkerer could love” comment XD

    1. I mean there’s nothing wrong with that if I was in the mindset to play around with stuff. If I had started out with one of those I’d probably be happy but I’ve now spent enough time screwing around that I just want something that works “out of the box”.

      But I’ll still prolly check it out! LOL

  3. Darn! I’m sorry that things didn’t meet your expectations! Turns out that tracking time is the easy part. The hard part is curating an up to date catalog of executables and pairing them with games. My guess is that’s why we’re missing things from Amazon’s launcher.

    I’ll table summaries for now and take a look at the launcher and see what I turn up.

    Good luck with your search!

    1. Oh man, please don’t be sorry, your service is awesome. I’m just the oddball with launchers like Amazon and Game Pass AND having them spread across 2 drives. But if you need me to test anything for you, just give a shout!

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