Why no launcher can give you the total

Every store counts the games it launches. Steam knows your Steam hours. Epic knows your Epic hours. Xbox knows about the titles that report statistics to Xbox services. None of them knows about the others, and none of them knows about the game you downloaded as a zip file and run from a folder.

A typical PC library in 2026 is spread across four or five launchers plus a handful of games that belong to no launcher at all. The number you actually want - "how many hours did I game this month?" - does not exist in any one place.

The three usual workarounds, and what breaks

  1. Add everything to Steam as non-Steam shortcuts. This works only if you always remember to launch through Steam, produces entries with no cover art or metadata, and still misses anything you start any other way.
  2. Use a library manager. Tools like Playnite unify your libraries beautifully and can track sessions they launch. The cost is that you have to adopt a new launch routine and let the manager become your front door to gaming.
  3. Add the numbers by hand. Open four launchers, copy four figures, ignore that each measures differently, and accept that the standalone games are simply absent. It is also a chore you will not repeat monthly.

All three share the same flaw: they require you to change how you start games, or to do manual work, in order to answer a question you only wanted to check occasionally.

The process-based approach

There is one thing every PC game has in common regardless of where it came from: it runs as a Windows process. A tracker that watches processes rather than launchers sees all of them equally.

PlayCounter runs in the system tray, notices when a recognised game's executable starts, and records the session until the process exits. A Steam game, a Game Pass title, an old GOG installer, a Riot client, and a jam game extracted to your desktop all land in the same list, measured by the same rule.

You do not launch anything through PlayCounter. You keep using Steam, the Xbox app, a desktop shortcut, or whatever you already use, and the record builds itself in the background.

What you get and what you give up

What you get: one library view with cover art, per-game totals, session counts, a session-by-session history, and a live view of what is running right now. No account, no launcher logins, no library imports, and the data lives in local app storage on your PC.

What you give up: the past. PlayCounter starts counting when you install it and does not import the hours already recorded by Steam or anyone else. If you want a lifetime archive, keep the store counters for history and use PlayCounter for the ongoing, unified picture. Older sessions can also be entered manually if a particular game matters to you.

There are also honest technical limits. Emulators typically run one process for every ROM, so an emulated session may be recorded against the emulator rather than the individual game. Browser and cloud games share one client process for the same reason. And a game with a generic or renamed executable may need a one-time local identification before it tracks automatically.

Setting it up

  1. Download PlayCounter for Windows and install it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the installer is hosted on GitHub with published checksums.
  2. Let it start with Windows so it is running when you are. It sits in the system tray and stays out of the way.
  3. Play as normal. Recognised games start and stop sessions on their own.
  4. Open it whenever you want the numbers - current session, per-game totals, session counts, and recent history.