Why estimates are unreliable
People remember sessions, not hours. A long Saturday is memorable; four forty-minute weeknight sessions are not, and they add up to more. Play is also spread across launchers, so no single number is available to check your guess against.
Some people overestimate and feel unnecessarily guilty. Others discover their casual habit is fifteen hours a week. Both are worth knowing, and neither is knowable by memory.
The options for measuring it
- Windows screen time. Windows Family Safety reports app usage for a managed account. It is designed for parental controls rather than personal review, and it reports applications rather than games specifically.
- Store counters. Steam's two-week figure is a decent proxy if all your play is on Steam. Otherwise you are adding partial numbers from several launchers.
- General time-tracking software. Tools built for billable work will log application usage, including games, but present it as productivity data rather than a gaming record.
- A dedicated game tracker. Records every recognised game automatically, in one place, with the history that makes weekly patterns visible.
Getting a real weekly number
PlayCounter runs in the background on Windows and records each recognised game session as it happens. After a couple of weeks you have something you cannot get any other way: an accurate distribution of your gaming time across days and across games, from every launcher and every standalone game at once.
Its statistics view shows how time spreads across your library and across recent days, and the history view lists individual sessions with their dates. That is enough to answer "is it evenings or weekends?", "is one game taking most of it?", and "did this month look different from last month?"
What the number is good for
A few uses come up repeatedly. Deciding whether a game was worth the money in hours per euro. Noticing that one live-service game absorbed the time you meant to spend on your backlog. Setting a personal cap and actually knowing whether you kept it. Having a factual answer in a household conversation instead of two competing guesses.
PlayCounter is a measurement tool, not a wellbeing product. It does not block games, enforce limits, or lecture you. It records what happened and shows it to you. If you need enforcement rather than measurement, Windows Family Safety and similar parental-control tools are the right category.
Because the record stays in local app storage and no account is involved, the number is yours. Nothing about your play is published anywhere.