The Games I’ve Played the Most

I wanted to do a blog post on this topic because it’s such a weird yet common sentiment amongst a multitude of gamers, and it’s been more prevalent in my mind with my continued play of Balatro. I first started playing Balatro because I was in the middle of Dave the Diver and came across the Balatro minigame. I had fun with it, so I decided to get the full game. Since then, it has rocketed up my library when sorted by playtime. A lot of weeks, I play every single day; it’s the perfect game to pick up for 20-30 minutes then set down until tomorrow. As of writing this post, I have played 138.6 hours of Balatro, making it my fourth-most played game on Steam.

There’s a certain clout that a game holds in your library when it’s your most-played game. It sits at the top of a high-up podium, staring down at the other games below it, triumphant (for now). The strangeness that I alluded to before comes with a hard truth that a lot of the games that have been played more than any other are not people’s favorite games. My favorite game I’ve ever played is Mass Effect 2, and it’s 30th on my Steam list in terms of hours played. I could go on and on with examples of this, but I won’t.

There are a couple of big reasons for this that everyone is usually pretty familiar with.

First is the attention barrier of entry. Why have I played Balatro so much more than my favorite games I’ve ever played? Because the best games (by my personal estimation) are the ones that capture your attention emotionally, mechanically, and intellectually. Meanwhile, the games that get played the most are the ones that can be done more mindlessly, often times with quick, tight gameplay loops that entertain without making a lasting impression. It’s the same reason that my girlfriend doesn’t mind watching a tv show together for four hours but struggles to agree to a 90-minute movie. Movies and incredible games typically require further emotional buy in and stronger focus. Watching four hours of Family Guy episodes is easy; watching The Lion King for less than an 1.5 hours can be a much harder sell.

Second is the time factor. It’s much more common to have a free 30 minutes than a free couple of hours. If I have a half hour to kill, I’m not booting up God of War or The Last of Us. These are games best experienced when there’s time for the stories to be told and for progress to be made. This is still connected to that emotional aspect previously mentioned, but my previous point is more prevalent when you do have hours to kill but can’t get yourself to exert the effort to experience something more taxing on your attention and emotions. In this case, we’re talking about literally not having the time to finish a mission in Mass Effect but definitely having enough time for some runs of Balatro.

With these looming constraints, I’ve found my playtime dominated by mostly games that I don’t particularly love. Here’s my list as it stands during the writing of this post:

NOTE: These games are largely based on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam stats. There are of course games that I’ve played potentially more than those listed below that I don’t have solid stats for.

Starfield - 64.3 Hours

In 2025, I finally got around to finishing Starfield, and I had a very opposite experience with it than what reviewers and other players have said. However, I believe it was because of my approach to the game. The second the game let me loose to explore outside of New Atlantis, I had a great time with the game doing all of the side content. The main quests were slogs in comparison. In fact, after having done so many of the side quests and only really having main quests left that I was interested in, I was extremely disappointed by the main quests and how repetitive they were all the way to the very end.

The funny thing is that I probably could have played this game for well over 100 hours considering the cyclical nature of the main narrative, but after the winds were taken out of my sails by the main quests, I just couldn’t do it. I was done with it. As of writing this, Starfield sits exactly at number 100 on my games ranking, sandwiched between PC Building Simulator (99) and Schedule I (101). However, as you can see here, it’s my 11th most-played game that I have statistics for.

Avowed - 67.3 Hours

Another game I played in 2025, Avowed was surprisingly fun for me despite the lackluster reviews and formidable competition throughout the year. It’s gotten me interested in trying out the Pillars of Eternity series since it’s set in the same universe. The gameplay stuck me very much as a refined version of Skyrim with lots of modern twist.

It’s far from a perfect game, though. The stealth mechanic is so tacked on and crummy; the frustration actually took me out of the experience because I heavily prefer and enjoy stealth when it’s an option in games. The overall narrative is pretty interesting, but it’s not the type that I envision sticking in my mind for very long. The overarching plot and themes stick out the most, but many of the individual story beats are already pretty lost on me and won’t sharpen any as time goes on. The voice acting and writing ranged from pretty decent to downright unbearable. I avoided Marius at all costs because every word he said made me want to wretch.

So overall, is it a great game? No, I wouldn’t say so. While not nearly as far down as Starfield on my list, it’s definitely far enough down that it being in my top ten in terms of time dedicated to a game could raise an eyebrow or two.

So what possessed me to spend so much time on it? I think it largely has to do with the recent gaming mode I’ve been in. I’ve grown frustrated with myself for not finishing games, and I was still enjoying the overall experience I was having with Avowed. However, when it ended, I felt ready for it to end. The 67.3 hours stemmed largely from that desire to finish the game, including a lot of the side content. Seeing as the combat was fluid and played easily, it was a good game to sink a few hours into here and there to finish, and those hours stacked up.

Mass Effect - 84.1 Hours

There are a few games on here that are genuinely great games that I absolutely love, and Mass Effect is one of them. This is actually one of the few narrative games that I’ve replayed. If I’m being honest, though, this 84.1 hours is a bit of a fib. A good chunk of that time was my girlfriend playing the game on my Steam account. However, I wasn’t about to give up an opportunity to mention Mass Effect!

I remember when I was 15 years old and first played Mass Effect. My dad planned a camping trip for the two of us, and I brought my laptop with Mass Effect on it so that I could play it. I was addicted. The RPG mechanics were interesting while not being too complex for my age. The plot, world building, and characters spoke so clearly to me. The gunplay felt clunky but fun and unique. It was just a magical experience for someone who was still pretty early in his love of gaming.

So yeah. I’ve played the crap out of this game. And I have the Mass Effect Legendary Edition to play through still. I’ll get to it and fall in love all over again soon.

Madden 22 & 24 - 89.6 & 135.8 Hours

I decided to group these together since I’m not sure how I could manage to talk about two Madden games as if they’re fundamentally different experiences. This is an easy one. The Madden games infuriate me. They’re so frustrating the way that the mechanics keep getting iterated upon in their design foundations even though the design of a lot of these things is fine. What’s not fine is the bugs. I exclusively play Madden for the franchise mode. When the franchise mode has so many issues, it’s hard to enjoy sometimes. However, I managed to get enough entertainment out of these two games to combine them for over 220 hours of gameplay.

As I mentioned above, these are the types of games I often play while watching something or just wanting to relax. They’re easy games to pick up and just play without much thought or effort. And, of course, I adore the game of football.

Persona 5 Royal - 123 Hours

We’re going to venture into the great here again before taking the final plunge into the games that this post is really targeting. Persona 5 Royal opened my eyes to JRPGs and turn-based games. While it’s still not a favorite genre of mine, I let myself explore these genres without dismissing them too quickly. That’s how I’ve been led to finishing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and keeping an eye on the price of Metaphor: ReFantazio. Persona 5 checked a lot of the same boxes that Mass Effect did for me, and that revelation has really helped me define what I value in games. What worked about Mass Effect (as previously mentioned) wasn’t the galactic travel and setting, or the open-zone nature of it, or the fact that it was a third-person shooter. And what Persona does so well is take those amazing aspects of games like Mass Effect and add a life-sim spin to it that reaches another chamber of my heart.

Baldur’s Gate 3 - 124.3 Hours

The interesting aspect of Baldur’s Gate 3 in the context of this list is its multiplayer support, and shortly here, that’s going to define a lot of my most-played games. Part of what made playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for over 120 hours a breeze was doing so with my girlfriend. Experiencing the events of the game together with our own custom characters made the adventure feel personal to our relationship. Playing games with somebody else makes the hours dissipate.

Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t need the help of another person to be incredible, though. It stands on its own two feet as a love letter to Dungeons & Dragons and the Baldur’s Gate series itself. I think a lot of Bethesda games fall into the trap of including hundreds of hours of playability just to say that it’s there. There’s a difference between In 124.3 hours of playing Baldur’s Gate 3, nothing felt unnecessary, uninteresting, or undercooked. The combat is as tense as the political landscape of the game world, and that tension kept me coming back for more.

Balatro - 138.6 Hours

The time of over 100 hours of narrative has come to an end with the game that started my interest in writing this post in the first place. Balatro has a ton going for it. As a game developer and programmer, I often times start to feel like I have a decent idea of the architecture of the game, and then something new happens that causes me to second guess everything. A tremendously sound and tight design plants Balatro into my mind like an addiction… except this addiction I can stop any time I want… maybe.

Balatro doesn’t contain very much of what I love in games, though. For a long time, I’ve just liked having cards to shuffle or play solitaire with while I watch something or talk to someone on the phone. Now, that’s been replaced with Balatro. Is Balatro more fun than shuffling or solitaire? Yes, but that’s not saying much. It’s great for what it is, but what it is doesn’t appeal to me that much when thinking about my favorite games. Hence this post being about the stark contrast between playing a game a lot and liking a game a lot.

Counter-Strike 2/Global Offensive - 151.7 Hours

Now we get to the colossal three games that collectively I’ve spent more than 40 full days of my life playing. I’ve also included a fourth honorable mention at the end. These four games have two threads in common: competitive and multiplayer.

There seems to be a fundamental urge in humanity to make friends and destroy our enemies. This is the foundation of the competitive online multiplayer genre. And that genre has a way of syphoning a player’s time at an efficient rate. These are the games that at some point in my life I’ve come home from school (since all of these are from my schooling days) and spent the entirety of the late afternoon and evening playing.

Let me be clear: I hate Counter-Strike. This game was never really that fun to me. I’ve always sucked at it, and sucking at it makes the game unfun. A lot of that has to do with the community. I had to choose between playing ranked matches, where I had a miserable time because I was awful and always died very early in the rounds, and normal matches, where the community ruined the game with cheaters and voice chat spammers who got all of their fun from ruining everybody else’s. There are no redeeming qualities in Counter-Strike for me.

The reason I had so many hours in the game was because of my friends. My friends loved this game, and if I wanted to stay relevant in the friend group, I had to play ball… “ball” meaning Counter-Strike, of course. My friends helped make the game a fun enough time that I would play with them for hours on end, but now, it disgusts me to see how much of my time was spent on this game during a time when games like The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Persona 5, Grand Theft Auto V, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Undertale released. I own all of these games now, but I still haven’t played some of them. Arguably, playing those would’ve been so much better uses of gaming time.

Paladins - 336.9 Hours

This is the only one of these last four that I’m not particularly ashamed of. I really enjoyed Paladins for a long time, and part of the reason was that I was actually pretty decent at it. I fell in love with Ruckus and Bomb King. While the multiplayer component was there, my friends were never very interested in Paladins, so I actually built up most of these hours playing by myself. I was part of the closed beta for the game starting back in either late 2015 or early 2016, and I continued to play for a couple of years. This is also the only game whose esports scene I took a modicum of interest in.

Eventually, my joy in the game began to wain. I started to take it a little too seriously and benefited greatly from stepping away and playing other things. I went back briefly around the time of COVID just to see how the game was, and it felt largely the same. If I’m being frank, there was nothing very special about Paladins to me other than getting to see the game evolve into its full release and feeling like there was a competitive video game that I actually excelled at. Well, “excel” is a strong word. Relative to my usual performance, though, that’s why it felt like.

Garry’s Mod - 475.1 Hours

Finally. The big enchilada. Garry’s Mod was my go-to game for years. Some friends got me into the game, but well after their desire to play the game had passed, I was still just getting started. My primary fixation was Trouble in Terrorist Town. I joined a server called Frozen Aether very regularly that I’m fairly certain doesn’t exist anymore. If I remember correctly, the server shutting down was one of the final nails in the coffin for me playing Garry’s Mod. Because even after my in-person friends left, I found myself consistently meeting the same people on the server and becoming very friendly with them.

The lion’s share of my hours are probably from becoming a moderator on that server. I was living the life! I came to truly care about the server, so I enjoyed being responsible for enforcing its rules to keep it going. I occasionally enjoyed Prop Hunt, but TTT was always what I came back for. It was often a barrel of laughs and a fun way to be somewhat competitive the way a board game can be competitive.

This is all largely nostalgia, though. I don’t particularly have glowing things to say about Gary’s Mod. It was simple and fun. There wasn’t a lot to it, and I never would have considered it one of my favorite games of all time. Again, simply put, it was fun.

League of Legends - Unknown

There’s no way for me to account for my hours in League of Legends, but there’s no denying it’s somewhere up here. If I had to guess, I would say it’s probably somewhere in between Paladins and Counter-Strike.

Like so many other players, League of Legends makes me so mad. However, to this day, my friends love to play it. It’s a great excuse to play something together. Everybody has a long history of playing it, so hopping back in is elementary. I no longer participate because, like I said before, I suck bad at competitive games. It’s just not what I like in games. Competitive games only ever feel fun to me when there are other reasons for it. Typically, that’s playing with friends, like in this case.