How to track playtime for itch.io games

There is no playtime feature

The itch.io desktop app installs, updates, and launches games. It does not record how long you played them, and the website shows purchases and downloads rather than sessions. This is not an oversight so much as a design choice - itch.io is deliberately lightweight and developer-friendly rather than a platform that instruments your play.

Why indie libraries are the worst-tracked libraries

An itch.io collection tends to be large, cheap, and varied: bundle purchases with hundreds of titles, game jam entries, demos, prototypes, and small experimental releases. Many are downloaded as a plain zip and run from wherever you extracted them, with no installer and no shortcut.

That is the exact profile of games that every launcher-based tracker ignores. If a meaningful share of your play happens in small indie games, your Steam profile is a misleading picture of what you actually play.

The bundle problem

Charity bundles put thousands of games into people's accounts at once. Nobody plays all of them, and nobody remembers which ones they tried. A passive tracker turns that pile into a usable record: which of them you opened, for how long, and how often you came back. That is genuinely useful for deciding what to revisit, and it is also the kind of feedback small developers rarely get to see reflected back to players.

Tracking downloaded and portable games

PlayCounter watches running Windows processes, so a game extracted to a folder and started by double-clicking its executable is tracked the same way a Steam game is. There is no need to add it to a library, create a shortcut, or launch it through anything in particular.

Small indie releases are the most likely to have executable names that PlayCounter does not yet recognise - game.exe, build.exe, or an engine default are common. For those you add the game as a local custom entry once, or submit the match for review so future players get it automatically. Recognition improves as more people play the same titles.

Games built with common engines sometimes share a generic executable name across many titles. In that case PlayCounter asks you to choose once instead of guessing, and remembers your answer on that PC.