Where Epic hides your hours
There are three routes to the same number in the Epic Games Launcher:
- The three-dot menu. In your Library, hover a game, click the three dots next to its title, and read the You've played line.
- List view. Switch your Library from grid to list using the bulleted-list icon near the top of the view. A Time Played column appears next to each title, which makes it easy to scan the whole library at once.
- Your profile. Open your profile and go to the Games tab, where hours played sit beside each title.
Games you have never launched through Epic show no value at all rather than zero.
What Epic counts and what it quietly skips
Epic's counter, like Steam's, measures how long the game process ran while the launcher was supervising it. Two consequences matter in practice.
First, a game started directly from its installation folder, from a desktop shortcut created by something other than Epic, or through a third-party frontend may never be seen by the launcher. Second, Epic's tracking began partway through the store's life, so time played in the early years of a free-giveaway title is often simply absent. Many people find a game they clearly sank a weekend into reporting a couple of hours, or nothing.
There is no way to correct that inside Epic. The launcher offers no manual editing of playtime and no import from another source.
The bigger problem: your library is not one library
Epic playtime answers one narrow question - how long you spent in games Epic launched. If you claimed dozens of free games there but actually play across Steam, Game Pass, GOG, and a folder of standalone installers, no single launcher can tell you where your gaming time went this month.
Checking four launchers and adding the numbers up by hand does not work either, because each store defines and truncates the value differently, and none of them counts the games that belong to no store.
Track Epic and everything else in one place
PlayCounter sits in the Windows system tray and watches which applications are running. When it recognises a game's executable, it starts timing; when the process exits, it closes the session. Epic titles are timed whether you start them from the Epic launcher, from a shortcut, or from the game folder, because none of that changes the process that runs.
The same mechanism covers your Steam, GOG, Game Pass, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net, itch.io, and unaffiliated games, giving you one list sorted by the time you actually spent. No account, no library import, and history stays on your PC.
To be clear about the trade-off: PlayCounter will not backfill the hours Epic already recorded, and a game with an unusual or renamed executable may need you to identify it once. After that, it is automatic.