The Qt3 Top 10 Games of the Decade Voting Thread

My top ten Steam games released last decade by Steam playtime:

Distance
RimWorld
Massive Chalice
Darkest Dungeon
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Polygod
Civilization VI
Terraria
Dragon Nest
FTL

So… some games are not on Steam, like Minecraft, and some games I purchased and played for a time on a different platform, like Hyper Light Drifter on PS4… however I have a couple reasons for not otherwise doing a straight transposition from hours played to ‘top ten’:

Sometimes it’s the way in which a game is experienced: Fez made the list in part because it’s among the very first games my son and I enjoyed together; he could barely hold the controller, sometimes upside down, yet it’s a very forgiving game with tons of interactivity including a day/night cycle, and the 2D/3D puzzles are intuitive and engaging.

An even bigger reason for my ordering are the impacts certain games have had on me; CS:GO isn’t a bad game, it’s an enjoyable way to pass some time, but I don’t personally gain any deeper insights into the world. Not that a game has to be this, but certain games really do leave me feeling changed for having played them, even if it’s for a couple hours only. To me, it’s a sign of having encountered a work of art, and I’ll rank a game much higher because of it.

Kairo is a game about exploring architecturally improbable, sometimes geometrically impossible spaces, yet it remains in memory as place that communicates some ineffable aspect of the human condition. Nothing is ever spelled out definitely, but it hints at some terrible aftermath and is at turns incomprehensible and beautiful. It’s Ozymandias, the computer game. I return to it quite frequently in mind compared to other games, although my playtime is short.

Certain games like Massive Chalice have both managed to take up a sizable amount of time, keeping me up past midnight, and also inspire deep, feeling thoughts about my time on Earth, ancestry, what it means to be a ruler, and coming face to face with mortality. It changed me as much as reading Neuromancer.

I don’t agree. There are what one might call distraction games or time wasters. I played a lot of Heroes of the Storm but I certainly don’t consider it a top 10 of the decade, it was just an easy distraction

Yeah - it’s like, imagine if you could sort all the media you’ve watched over the last decade by time spent watching. It might show that you’ve watched Love Island for far longer than the time you’ve spent watching the film Moonlight, but I don’t think it’s in any way dishonest to then rank the latter above the former when you’re judging the overall quality of the experience. It would be like judging books by page count.

God, I am so glad to see some of these play times. Makes me feel better about my own =) Many of these games don’t really reflect the correct times I’ve put into them. For instance, this is probably a small fraction of the hours I’ve actually played KSP because I typically launched from a separate folder, with CKAN and no Steam overlay. Also, the Conan numbers are inflated and Ark as well due to lots of idling here and there. The game on this list that surprises me is actually Origins. I forgot I played through every origin on that thing and did a revisit a few years later. I guess it is my favorite DA game of the series. Also, even with all those hours in KSP, I believe I have double that in Minecraft. It’s my space out and play game.

Some games are 300-hour experiences. Some are 1 hour experiences. You wouldn’t want the latter to try to be the former, or vice versa. In order to love World of Warcraft, you can’t have played it for 2 hours and set it aside–if you do, you haven’t gotten the real experience. On the other hand, Florence is one of the best games of the decade, but my passion for it doesn’t compel me to play it 400 times to rival the playtime of some inferior game.

Well put.

I did, but I play with a, a lot of mods, so I question how much of the actual released game I am enjoying versus the visions of others that were added to it. It’s like House Rules. If I play a card or board game with a lot of House Rules to make it fun for me and mine, I am still going to play it, but I’d have a hard time recommending it or putting it on a top list. As envisioned, it was clearly not enough for me. Or put another way, a notable flaw made it lower than others I played less often.

I may have done this wrong, I put all the games I’ve played over the last decade in a hat and then drew out 10 for my list.

Hey, it’s your list, man.

I got lucky, I even really like most of them. ;)

Where are you guys finding the list of total hours played for games on Steam? I can’t find the function to do that in Steam.

Regarding hours played, I kind of don’t understand how people don’t have hundreds of hours played in games they like. Strategy games and the like just take so long these days. I just started Oxygen not Included, and after my first game got to the point around cycle 100 where I’m having the cascading loss effect and my dudes are puking everywhere and dying, so it’s probably time to start another game.

That first game alone (plus a couple of very minor starts before that) took 30 hours of total time.

So I’m not sure how people play these games 15-20 times and don’t have hundreds of hours racked up.

In fact, I thought about starting another thread about this issue - I have a lot more free time than I used to, and I still don’t see a way to get through all of the games that are out there. When I look at things like Monster Hunter World (I have 150 hours into it, and haven’t even come close to finishing the Iceborne expansion), Dark Souls 3 (I suck at those games, it takes me a ton of time to get anywhere), things like that, it still doesn’t feel like I have much hope of finishing more than 5-6 games a year.

The list is in your game list in your profile.
Be aware Steam doesn’t take count of time in offline mode or when its servers are down (Let alone if you launch the games outside of Steam if they don’t rely on the Steamworks copyprotection).

Nothing wrong with rating games that way. But it seems to me that you are choosing to interpret “top 10 games” as “games I most often preferred to play” where others here are interpreting “top 10 games” differently. In many cases, “which games were most influential?”

In my case, I interpreted top “10 games” as those that stick with me. As I do other things. In my dreams. And at random moments months or even years later.

That’s the way I would go in rating books and movies and even TV shows, too. I may have watched a lot of MASH and Cheers and The Cosby Show, but I rate The Wire light years higher because moments from it come to me constantly, years later. Ditto a book like The Tiger’s Wife.

By that test, Disco Elysium is my idea of the best game I played, even though I played a lot of the games like Civ vastly more hours. It’s not The Wire, but it sure does come to mind a lot as I’m living my daily life.

I guess I should see if I can sort out what to vote for.

Contenders I can think of from the top of my head:
Gloomhaven
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition
Into the Breach
Just Cause 2
The Wolf Among Us
The Last of Us
Mass Effect 3
Sid Meier’s Civilization V
Fallout: New Vegas
Borderlands 2
XCOM 2
Offworld Trading Company
Atom Zombie Smasher
Spelunky
Stellaris (improved a lot with the expansions)
Portal 2
Desktop Dungeons

And a lot of other board games and others I can’t think of now. I’ll decide which ones to vote for later in the weekend.

Also, Steam isn’t universal.

My most-played games by time are flight sims that aren’t the Steam versions (DCS, IL-2, Prepar3D, FSX), console RPGS (Witcher 3, Mass Effect series, Skyrim, Fallout NV and 4, etc.), and… Star Realms. The 68 hours Steam shows for Star Realms doesn’t include a couple of hundred hours, probably, on my iPad.

It might not be universal, but GOG Galaxy is galactic :)

Indeed. I own a box that connects directly to my television and uses bespoke instruments of control. Although I can stuff round platters of gamosity into its maw, it also boasts the ability to sell me ethereal fare similar to they way they do it in the kingdom of Valve. I have used to to visit a horrifying land populated by fungal monstrosities and giraffes and another where a redheaded lass slew giant mechanized creatures with a spear.

Consoles are the devil. Haven’t you been following along?

I can concurr: my life has become a nightmare since @Chappers forcefully put one on my desk!

Some games just aren’t very long. I don’t need to play through Disco Elysium a dozen times to like it.

Heck, Outer Wilds by design takes less than 22 minutes to beat once you know how. It’s one of my favourite games of the decade, but I’m not going to run through it another 200 times to equal my playtime in the comparatively forgettable Fallout 4…