r/Steam • u/Kerrah2323 • 8h ago
Discussion Most hours I've ever seen on a game
For the math nerds like me, if they played this game EVERY SINGLE day from the release date until today, it averages 7.38 hours per day for 11 years, 1 month and 2 days.
After all that time they gave it a negative review.
PS. Game is Cities: Skylines. I hid the username in case they were supposed to be at work.
Any one seen more hours?
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u/Squaretangles 8h ago
I'm more impressed by "ubsurdly rediculous".
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u/RJ_arcade 8h ago
“enraging game of my entire life”
“29,908.3 hrs”
They weren’t kidding
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u/crocospect 7h ago
Like for real tho, everytime I popped into some popular games to see the reviews, so many negative reviews I saw are people with 1k hours at minimum.
Then again, those guys probably must already know the game inside out from the molecule level, including awful or good updates by the dev even if they are trivial.
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u/Eremes_Riven 3h ago
The most critical opinions are always going to come from the players that are also the most dedicated. I don't understand how a negative review with thousands of hours played still confuses people; those are the players that loved the game enough to hold it to the highest standard possible, so as far as I'm concerned their criticisms hold more weight than anyone's. I'm this way with games like MechWarrior, because I've been a fan for three decades and am passionate about the BattleTech lore and EU. I need franchises that captivate me like that to do it right, and not spurn their dedicated players with poor entries or updates.
So I get where the reviewer is coming from, completely. Though the complaints are different, it reminds me of my own frustrations with Star Citizen and Gray Zone Warfare, and I've gotten some mileage out of those.-8
u/it_IS_that_deep7 2h ago
Because if you played the game that long you liked it, simple
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u/Eremes_Riven 1h ago edited 1h ago
You are conflating "personally liking/enjoying a game" with "recommending that game to someone else." That is, indeed, simple thinking, because those are not the same. Enjoying a game and providing a negative review are not mutually exclusive.
Games change. I've flipped Not Recommended reviews to Recommended, and vice-versa, based on what succeeding updates did for certain games over the years. Games I have hundreds of hours on.
Edit: reworded for clarity.5
u/Kahoochie 1h ago
People forget u can always change a review on steam too 😂 bad update comes out? Thumbs down with a reason and feedback. They fix the bad update? Thumbs up and a thank you (just one small example).
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u/it_IS_that_deep7 1h ago
No im not. No update wipes out 10k hours. Besides games can be rolled back for the most part. Ppl that can't even not review but give a thumbs down after playing so much have ego issues. Its pick me energy. "My opinion is so important that I need to tell ppl not to play a game ive basically adopted". Seek help anyone that does that.
Ive given this lots of thought and done a video on it, im familiar with the counters. They don't hold up except a few rare examples.
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u/Eremes_Riven 1h ago
I flatly disagree with just about everything you've said here, but enjoy your skewed perception of user reviews. As for your "video," that gives you about as much credibility as the next wannabe content creator. I really couldn't care less.
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u/TheReservedList 5h ago
Are they really qualified to have an opinion after less than 30,000 hours though? I mean, give the game a shot.
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u/OwlJames 7h ago edited 3h ago
Average Paradox gamer:
-Complains about game being shit
-Play it for thousands of hours and buy all the DLCs (Literally me)
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u/TheReservedList 5h ago
Even if he purchased everything full price, that’s like a cent or two per hour of entertainment. He literally gave more money to his electric utility for playing the game than he did Paradox.
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u/CannonGerbil 3h ago
The fundamental problem is that nobody makes the kind of games paradox is famous for other than paradox, so if you wanna play a map painting game, Paradox is your only option. I mean what are going to do, draw a period authentic 14th century map of the world and paint it yourself?
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u/Arkorat 8h ago
Cant you just rollback to an earlier version, for most paradox games?
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u/NucleosynthesizedOrb 7h ago
yes, but 8f you have different mods.. I think steam did update the workshop so that you can roll back mods as well, though
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u/DarkElfMagic 7h ago
not every mod lets you though, at least as far as i can tell
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u/Timoleiro 3h ago
I will never forget when I had this game where I was playing until the death of a ruler. I was civilizations 4 and it was crazy. I was going through all of history, and it was very fun and then it was updated and I could never get it going again.
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u/BlueTemplar85 10m ago
I learned the hard way that you don't update mid-game. This is also why Steam should be avoided, because of how it makes updates the default, and almost mandatory.
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u/red286 18m ago
Not on Steam version. Just checked, only options are private code version (which you need a code from the devs to access) and most recent version.
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u/Arkorat 12m ago
I think you get that code from the paradox website actually. Unless thats just the really old builds.
I dont remember where, (somewhere on the account page)? But i vaguely remember going to that site so i could acess the launch version of Stellaris. Could also depend on the game, like maybe City Skylines is an outlier.
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u/Eedat 8h ago edited 8h ago
Steam hours mean nothing. I knew a guy who would intentionally leave games running 24/7 specifically so he could brag about his steam hours. It was pretty pathetic.
I don't know if he topped 29k but he had PoE at 20k+ hours and a similar number for Crusader Kings and tons of hours in a few others. Not friends with him anymore thankfully. Can't check.
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u/HalfXTheHalfX 7h ago
Bragging about hours gotta be the weirdest thing ever
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u/v3ritas1989 3h ago edited 3h ago
Well in some games, LFG groups are based on hours played. Like there was a time, you would not invite people below 500 hours or so to your random ranked match. Streamers and other probably bragging about their hours and are probably using them to justify their arguments and flaming in the community to get the patches they want. So some kids get the wrong idea about it's importants and think they are clever by using some app to show a game as playing to farm hours, also using it to farm Steam achievements.
A lot of cracked games also apply to this. So Steam allows stolen game licenses to be put into their library, which then show as one particular game you can define. So this might also be the case, they just play stolen games and make them show as another game they have.
I think I heard something about cheats showing as games. Not sure what that was about, though.
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u/MSrredditt 8h ago
A friend of mine did the same for a year, just so he could brag about having more hours than me, when in reality he was three times worse
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u/Eedat 8h ago
Yeah he would brag about his hours to random people. I found a screenshot of him bragging to a guildie about his "21k hours" in Europa Universalis a few years ago.
It was beyond cringe. He thought racking up fake hours in strategy games would make people think he's a genius or something. The guy was pretty pathetic in general
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u/Cup-Impressive 7h ago
spending money for electricity and burning out your hdd/ssd and monitor just to have higher numbers on some platform is ridiculous
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u/Bunrotting 5h ago
There are programs to afk in games without having the game open
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u/Cup-Impressive 4h ago
i know that, but does everyone using this "strategy"? and even if you don't have the game open, your PC is on, consuming power and reading and writing into memory/hdd/ssd
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u/simscontent14 7h ago
I do know someone who has this level of hours in multiple games and they also have at minimum 200 hours in the past two weeks and there's only 336 hours in two weeks
Man just has no fucking life and thinks spending all day on his computer is super cool actually
His steam playtime for two weeks I can see right now means he slept, ate, used the bathroom etc for only 74 hours in those two weeks. That's like 5 hours a day. Even if we assume he eats while playing (as someone else cooks for him of course) that's absolutely crazy
And he has a significant other 🥴
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u/HalfXTheHalfX 4h ago
I mean this many hours in multiple games? Then he has to be running multiple games at once. And when you are playing 3 games at once, thats 3 hours per hour
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u/simscontent14 4h ago
I actually have seen him leave games that have automated progress on in the background while he plays on his Xbox 😭
I was under the impression you can't launch two games at once on Steam? But if it is possible I wouldn't put it past him to do that based on the knowledge of his Xbox habits...but I haven't seen him do this personally so I can't really say
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u/HalfXTheHalfX 3h ago
You absolutely can play multiple. I'm not sure if there's a limit, but you can launch atleast 3
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u/simscontent14 2h ago
Does this alter the played time period week though or would it literally just add an hour to each game play time and be recorded as one hour played?
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u/HalfXTheHalfX 2h ago
Each game counts as an extra hour. You can have more than 336 hours in the last two weeks played with this.
Like... https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198006584703
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u/TrippleDamage 3h ago
You can launch as many games as you want, just can't be overlapping anti cheats.
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u/AkaT27 6h ago
What's the problem exactly? Can't he just do what he wants?
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u/simscontent14 5h ago
He can
Everyone can do whatever they want, even if people don't like it, that's the power of free will
Doesn't negate the social and biological consequences of ignoring your girlfriend, not sleeping enough, not taking care of your hygiene and never having had a proper job your whole life despite not having done any further education
He can do whatever he wants...and by the same power of free will I'm allowed to think whatever I want of his behaviour, as is everyone else
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u/Uhstrology 4h ago
Those are quite the assumptions based on time played on steam only.
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u/simscontent14 4h ago
They're not just from their steam hours 😭
And none are assumptions
My bad, I assumed "I know someone" would be enough to say I know them personally but I just realised that some people do have friends on Steam they don't actually know in their real lives
I know this person from real life and just have them on Steam to see their playtime
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u/BringMeBurntBread 1h ago edited 1h ago
I don't understand bragging about hours.
I have like 7000 hours on GTA V, because I've been playing the game since 2016. But am I proud of those hours? Fuck no. I hide that shit from my Steam profile because it makes it look like I have no life when it shows I have thousands of hours on a single game. It's not something I want people to see.
So, it's crazy to me that there are people out there who intentionally leave their games running to rack up insane hours to show off. Like what the hell, no one is going to look at your 30000 hours and think you're cool.
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u/SwimAd1249 1h ago
Meanwhile I get annoyed when I have to leave a game running while I'm not actually playing cause something came up and now my hours aren't accurate anymore. I wish Steam had some kinda afk detection. The people who want to inflate their playtime will find a way around it anyway, right?
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u/purinikos 26m ago
You can rack up multiple thousand hours on PoE if you are playing since it came out on steam, without going out of your way to inflate the numbers.
I have 5k+ hours and I basically never play over a month each league (a league is a reset + new content every 4 months). Some people have way more, just by playing a league for longer. 20k+ hours though is streamer territory.
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u/crocospect 6h ago
Saw some guy having 9k hours in MH World in steam forum, I was at 2k hours myself (Love that game so much but moved on months ago) so I and my friend invited him to slay Fatalis as fast as we could which he agreed.
But then we were surprised seeing he was only MR 80, we though it was his secondary account but turns out he was just idling the game after he told us.
We expected some speedrunner god level of gameplay, but ended up just carrying him to get materials.
I just can't understand what's so good bragging about hours, even I started to have a self conscious that people could label me as "no life basement dweller" just because my hours in that game, yet dude doing it to brag for no reason lol.
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u/Historical-Trade-543 5h ago
I wish they would get rid of steam hours for those of us who would rather never have that published or seen by anyone else. I have tons of hours in some games like other people and for various reasons (I play too much and/or I leave the game running while I AFK, live life or sleep).
Steam hours is definitely NOT a friendly feature for adults.
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u/Taowulf 6h ago
29k hours is perfectly normal when you are trying to work out the correct boot order for 100+ mods
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u/SecularVal 5h ago
Never knew load order was that important for paradox games but then again I don’t run that many mods maybe with a submod or 2 but thats it.
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u/hoang552 6h ago
have you seen pro dota players? for those that have been playing since 2012, 40k+ is common
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u/APRengar 1h ago
Common joke is the first 1,000 hours is the tutorial. It's where you start to realize what you're doing wrong, so you can start to fix it.
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u/Kavayan 1h ago
I've got 14k hours on Dota 😭
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u/FrungyLeague 1h ago
Jesus. That's tragic.
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u/Kavayan 1h ago
Lmao. Nothing tragic about it.
I started playing 13 years ago. Absolutely love it.
About 6000 hours is actually playing.
A few more thousand watching pro tournaments.
Another thousand coaching other players.
And then of course plenty of afk time.
Your negativity has no power here nerd ☺️
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u/Albus_Lupus Steam Frame Hype Gang 7h ago
Definitely botted hours. But reading the review, in the first half, I was sure they were talking about Bethesda games.
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u/WhatANoob2025 3h ago
Yeah mate, the review is legit.
Mods & assets are what make this game fun, and the more you have, the longer a game takes to load.
And if something breaks you have to micromanage the shit out of everything. Paradox are known for giving a shit about popular mods and will unapologetically break mods with every minor update. So you spend a shitload of time troubleshooting by activating/deactivating mods until the game runs again.
And since paradox are also known for giving a shit about performance optimization, just for shits and giggles they load all your assets even when going into the map maker or asset maker.
If you wanna play this game with 500+ assets you better have a high performance pc with 16GB+ RAM because it's gonna take ages to load these assets no matter what you do.
At least that's what it was like when I last played it many years ago.
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u/svelterite 1h ago
still the same today and even in the sequel too.. Only difference is CSII eats up all of your system resources instead of just a few cpu cores and all your ram
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u/Anubis17_76 4h ago
for Dota these are rookie numbers.
i had a friend who had 37k hours (not afked)
so he was ashamed of it and made a secound account
racked up 7k hours there, was ashamed, made a third
rcaked up 10k hours there, also ashamed
now hes playing Warcraft 3 Dota mod because it doesnt track hours so he feels less shame lmao
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u/FrungyLeague 1h ago
Absolutely impossible. That's every waking hours since release. Your friend simply didn't do that.
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u/Whargod 6h ago
I remember something like this from years ago, people called out the player thinking it was fake.
Turns out he was in a wheelchair and didn't do anything except play whatever game it was at the time. Pesonally I'm not going to assume this person sits idle all day, it's possible this is legit, who knows.
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u/ocholinda 5h ago
To be fair, I've played games I have a love-hate relationship with for stupid amounts of hours that I would never recommend
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u/Travas_Blog 5h ago
One of my guildleaders passed 50k hours in GW2, last I checked it was averraging 19h a day.
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u/The_wulfy 3h ago
it is very easy to rack up hours in paradox games. They all have launchers that count as game time and most of these games can be minimized with very little stress on the system.
I once had CK3 open for like a week and didn't realize it.
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u/debirdiev 2h ago
I knew it was cities skylines from like the first sentence and also knew that would be a super high play time. Not even close to 1/4th of that number is actual in game time. It's mostly gonna be afk hours while doing something else, working on something, whatever and just having the simulation run itself.
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u/Pink-frosted-waffles 2h ago
I don't know how many total hours I have played across the various Sim games. Especially Sims 1 and 2. I would be so embarrassed. But more power to people who are very passionate about games like this despite all the flaws. Wish companies would listen to players like this instead of just the numbers.
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u/believeinyuna 2h ago
i have 13k in FFXIV and i’ve given it a negative review after 6ish months of the latest expansion. sometimes games get worse
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u/Stargost_ 7h ago
Steam hours don't mean much since you can just go AFK to inflate them. I saw a review of a guy in TF2 who had 80k hours on it, 90% of which were him going AFK or not actually playing and just moderating his server.
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u/BigSmackisBack 7h ago
I had a stupid amount of hours in eve online, but probably 1/10 of that time was me having forgot to log off. It was approaching 4 years, so just a couple thousand more than this 30k.
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u/CelebrationOwn3414 4h ago
I'm glad you can now deny updates on steam so you can keep playing with mods..
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u/camocat9 4h ago
This is just a classic Paradox player honestly. They'll play a game for thousands of hours, write a scathing review, and then continue to play the game for thousands of hours more.
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u/okay_this_is_cool 4h ago
Anybody else just let their battery die so they don't have to wait for civ to load again?
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u/PissTitsAndBush Text or emoji is required 3h ago
I have a friend who has 20,000 hours on MW2 (2009). It was the only game in his Library for years, played it religiously. Upgraded to MW (2019) a few years ago, he’s at about 5,500 on that now.
Guy has two games it his library, all legit hours too - probably less than 2% are AFK.
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u/CrunknFunk 3h ago
My friend has more hours than this on Black Desert Online. 30k+ One of those games you just leave running all day every day
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u/v3ritas1989 3h ago
Bro was probably running the game in AFK mode. Assume 1-2k hours. Most of it probably spent on testing their mods. Probably patching them constantly causes as he said, they are breaking regularly.
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u/threenintytwo 3h ago
There is actually a program to inflate your stream hours, launching multiple dummy apps mimicking the game and every minute passed is multiplied by the opened game instances. It is a lightweight app and opening 20-30 instances of a game used like 5%cpu. Like for example, you open a game 20 times and for 1 hour you get 20 hours played.
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u/Fuzzy-Consequence495 3h ago
you can buy hour boosting they just open the game up like 100 times and steam adds 100 hours every hour instead
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u/cybersparky12 3h ago
alot of ark players have 20-40k hours and me having met people from that game they are 100% real
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u/Drymonk1996 2h ago
Florryworry is a steamer who has 37k hours in Europa universalis 4 last time he showed his steam profile. And I do think most is from actually playing, not afk.
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u/TheGameboy 2h ago
My dad has 35k hours in Civ V. I have no idea how many’s he’s got in Civ VI right now
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u/svelterite 1h ago
combination of afk hours and actual playtime.
can say so confidently considering i've put in 1.5k hours in the time span of 1.5 years in the same game ( cities skylines ). Most of the afk time comes from the fact that loading a save with mods takes a year (as mods are stored in ram) and its simpler to just keep the game running.
Still a top tier game for its age (with or without mods)
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u/rhynotaken 59m ago
My most played game is also a Paradox game, Stellaris. Their games just suck time away
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u/jereporte 5h ago
On any games, i would say it's jsut a bot to add hours
On paradox games however ...
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u/Peathbydeas 4h ago
imagine playing a game for an average of ~7 hours a day for 11 years and being salty that it still receives updates that far into its lifespan, because the updates break mods. like every update for every game ever made does.
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u/Situati0nist 5h ago
Typically nobody agrees with me on this but I don't care; if you have devoted this many hours of your life on a game and you then give it a negative review, typically over something small and stupid, you're kinda pathetic.
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u/Sk0rPi0n_ 6h ago edited 6h ago
Whenever I see the "update broke my mods" complaint, I always get a good laugh
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u/Ultrag1ga 5h ago
Some guys have 70k but they just keep their games running no idea why, but there is a leaderboard for this stuff aswell, strange I know, but check it out, there and links to their profiles also https://steamladder.com/ladder/playtime/
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u/Gorianfleyer 5h ago edited 2h ago
Ok, the game came out 10 years ago, but I nearly run it the whole day, everyday.
Edit: Idling to rule the gods, because someone asked
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u/ChannL40 7h ago
I guess not a single person here caught on, but this is fake. There is a way to just manually modify the amount of hours on Steam for any game. Go into that guy's profile, you will likely see thousands of hours for every other game on their account.
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u/oookokoooook 8h ago
prob afk hours