Your favorite non-steam games and ways to monitor playtime
Your favorite non-steam games and ways to monitor playtime
Steam isn't the sole platform for digital game distribution, and several popular titles aren't accessible there. For instance, Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail can only be found via Hoyoplay or Epic Games launchers. Similarly, games like LoL and Valorant are also restricted to non-Steam services. Which non-Steam games do you play regularly? (If available on Epic Store or GOG, they still count as Steam-available) Regarding tracking your gameplay time, I can share details for specific cases. For example, with GI on Linux, I log hours played on Lutris, noting the installation date. On Windows, tracking time isn't possible.
It varies by game. Some launchers display hours while others don’t, and it doesn’t seem to matter much later on.
I don’t really dive deep into games. I just play, finish what I start, and move forward. My collection is mostly split between Steam and GOG. Ngl, I don’t keep track of in-game time that way—just the days it takes to finish. Used to have a spreadsheet, but I got lazy and stopped.
It's available through the EA launcher as well, showing this feature exists across different platforms. This reinforces the idea that such a tracker or tool isn't limited to one specific launcher.
A few titles were limited to certain platforms before joining Steam. Similar ones included Apex and others. I think one I played was Diabotical from Epic, a Quake-style game. Sometimes free games like Star Citizen or Blizzard titles on Battle.net appeared. I don’t mind tracking playtime; mostly just used them for my WoW characters.
Other digital or contest-based games provide their own time logs through APIs or websites. The one I played the most was likely Guild Wars 2.