How to boost your Steam hours: five methods compared

What Steam actually counts

Your Steam client tells Steam which game is running; Steam adds the minutes to that game on your account. Nothing happens faster than real time: an hour of running is an hour of playtime. What you can do is run several games at once. Steam accepts up to 32 in the same session, and each of them collects the same minutes, so a day of idling 32 games adds 768 hours to your profile in total.

Hours count for games you own, for free-to-play games your account has claimed, and for games shared with you through Steam Family, as long as their owner is not playing. They do not count for DLCs, tools or soundtracks. The profile can lag behind by a few minutes, sometimes more after a long session.

Method 1: leave the game open on your PC

The oldest trick: launch the game, minimise it, walk away. It works and it costs nothing but electricity. It also ties up your computer, runs one game at a time unless you launch several, and stops the moment you want to play something else, put the machine to sleep, or Windows decides to update.

Method 2: a desktop idler

Tools such as Idle Master Extended or Steam Game Idler tell Steam a game is running without loading it, so they are light and can idle many games at once. They are free and open source. The catch is the same as method 1: your PC has to stay on and signed in the whole time, the setup is by hand, and some of these projects go unmaintained for years.

Method 3: ArchiSteamFarm on your own server

ArchiSteamFarm is the power-user option: a daemon that idles games and farms trading cards for as many accounts as you configure, usually on a home server or a rented VPS. It is excellent and actively maintained, and it assumes you are comfortable editing JSON files, keeping a Linux box up to date and reading logs when Steam changes something. A VPS that runs it around the clock generally costs more per month than a hosted plan does.

Method 4: a hosted idling service

Services like idlr run the games on their own servers: you sign in once, pick the games, close the tab, and the hours keep coming with your PC off. They pause when you actually play and resume afterwards. Prices start around two dollars a month for one account. Before trusting one with your account, check four things: how it signs in (a QR code or a token you can revoke from Steam is better than handing over your password), whether it needs your Steam Guard secret, whether it publishes a status page, and what its terms say about refunds.

We compared the main services, ours included and with the rows we lose left in, on the comparison page.

Method 5: buying an account that already has hours

Don't. Buying or selling Steam accounts breaks the Steam Subscriber Agreement, the seller can often recover the account through Steam Support, and the hours are someone else's anyway. Everything above adds hours to an account that is yours.

Side by side

The short version, for one Steam account:

• Game left open: free, PC on, one game unless you launch more, no setup.
• Desktop idler: free, PC on and signed in, up to 32 games, manual setup, upkeep depends on the project.
• ArchiSteamFarm: server or VPS to pay for and maintain, any number of accounts, cards farmed, JSON configuration.
• Hosted service: from about $2 a month, PC off, up to 32 games, no setup beyond a sign-in; you trust a third party with a session.
• Bought account: not yours, against the rules, skip it.

Is any of this safe for the account?

Idling itself does not trigger VAC: no game files are touched and no cheat runs. The real risk is what you hand to a third party. We wrote a separate guide on that: Is Steam idling VAC safe?.