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?
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…
Fixed for you.
Yeah this game length thing is crazy. I played Stellaris for 400 hours because I really wanted a space grand strategy game, despite it being obvious fairly early that this was not the one. A Short Hike, on the other hand, is a near perfect videogame, which I finished in one evening.
But neither made my list, because my criteria include both love and importance. So Stellaris was neither and A Short Hike is only one of those things, I suspect. Whereas Bloodborne is both a landmark game of the decade, and my favourite game of all time.
Just a reminder that voting closes in about 3 days on this Sunday night.
Reasonably sure I can name the top 5. Not terribly unexpected.
That’s exactly my point - there is a dichotomy that has clearly show up in the thread between games people say are their top games and the games they play the most. Some of the answers have been fascinating - like people who say I just play games I don’t like more than the ones I do! Like, why play games you don’t like when you have games you like more!? It’s a very interesting quirk of human psychology.
Hey, I think somebody just called Richard “human”!
For me at least, influential doesn’t rate. I respect influence a great deal, but it’s not why I’m putting a game in a top 10 list. That is purely based on the experience I personally have with the game.
You just can’t measure (sorry, Tom) fun – or engagement, interest, beauty, obsession, hauntedness, whatever – by the pound. Alien Isolation is a deeply flawed game that I wasn’t even sure I liked when I stopped playing it, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it in the five years since. Its setting absolutely captivated me to a degree that has transcended the (imo problematic) game mechanics. Hearthstone is my GOTD and also probably has the most hours played for me, but I put it at the top because it was the first game since Age of Empires II that I made any concerted effort to play competitively, and because it additionally drew me into the worlds of streaming and e-sports in a way I’d never been before. Skyrim is less a game to me than a place – like Unreal, or Ultima III, or Half-Life, or many other games that have left an indelible mark on me. It’s a place I’ve spent many very enjoyable – many deeply absorbed – hours, and it’s a place I know I’ll go back to, for five minutes or fifty hours or something in between. A minute in Skyrim is felt more intensely than a minute in Hearthstone or Grim Dawn, at least in an atmospheric sense, but it also requires longer chunks of spare time, and is a harder game to just fall back into when you have a short amount of time. It’s also harder to play with other people around, and that’s a factor that has increasingly defined my gaming choices. The word “like” is a rather crude bludgeon to apply to these varieties of interest, response, and circumstance.
There are just a lot of different factors to take into consideration, and ‘amount of time played’ is far from the only one.
Of course, nobody is actually saying that. Nobody puts hundreds of hours into a game they don’t like.
A lot of the angriest negative opinion things in Steam try to prove your last point wrong, although I jest and it seems pretty clear those are just tantrums written by somewhat immature people.
I think you can put hundreds of hours into a game with which you have a love/hate relationship – our relationships to our MMOs are, in my opinion, very complex and not always healthy – but straight up dislike I have a hard time believing, unless you’re somehow doing it for the money (playtesting, esports, reviewing a game and somehow feeling obligated to stick with it for that long). Or yeah, I guess some folks might just really be into hate-playing… God bless 'em?
I can play a game that is very long and enjoy it decently enough, and then play a game that is shorter and enjoy it vastly more. Your posts on this topic are exceedingly dumb.
I have a really hard time understanding that love/hate thing for games, as although some around here define games as surfing the fine line of a player’s frustration, my personal trigger is so sensible I’d rather use my time otherwise (for instance lying in bed just thinking, I kid you not). Of course, that decision is one of the most personal there is, but the perspective of being angry for hours over a game is a terrifying one for me!