A common question among PlayStation players is whether time spent in pause menus, on loading screens, or AFK in a safe area counts toward the hours-played counter. The short answer: it probably does, but Sony has never officially confirmed exactly how the timer works.
What Sony has (and has not) said
When the PS5 launched with playtime stats, outlets including Kotaku asked Sony for clarification on what the timer measures. Sony did not provide a clear answer. To this day, there is no official documentation explaining whether idle time, menu time, or suspended time is included or excluded.
What we do know from the PS5 interface itself:
- Playtime is displayed in whole hours, rounded to the nearest hour
- The counter updates on a delay — sometimes immediately, sometimes after a day
- The total appears to reflect time since you first launched the game on your account, not per-console
What community testing suggests
Based on player reports and comparisons between PlayStation hours and in-game playtime counters (which many titles include in their pause menus or save files), the PS counter tends to run higher than active playtime. This strongly suggests that idle time counts.
Scenarios that likely inflate your total:
- Pause menu AFK — Leaving a game paused while you eat, take a call, or walk away
- Loading screens — Long initial loads, fast travel screens, and level transitions
- Title screens and menus — Time spent in the main menu before starting or after finishing a session
- Suspended games — On PS5, switching away from a game without closing it keeps it in memory. It is unclear whether suspended time continues counting.
- Cutscenes you walk away from — Unskippable cinematics still run the game application
How other platforms compare
Understanding PlayStation's approach is easier with context:
- Steam — Tracks "hours played" while the game process is running, including idle time if the game is the active window. Steam does not count time if you are AFK for extended periods in some cases.
- Nintendo Switch — Counts time the game application is open, rounded to the nearest five hours (yes, five). Widely considered to include idle time.
- Xbox — Shows "time played" on the console and in the Xbox app. Generally tracks application runtime, similar to Steam.
- In-game counters — Many games track only active gameplay time (excluding menus and pause). These are often significantly lower than platform-level counters.
Why this matters
If idle time counts, your PlayStation hours will naturally be higher than what you subjectively feel you "played." A session where you played for two hours but left the game paused for another hour might register as three hours. Over hundreds of sessions across years, this adds up — and it is one reason the counter can feel inflated compared to your memory.
Conversely, if tracking fails to record sessions entirely (due to offline play, PSN outages, or bugs), your total could be lower than even your idle-inclusive time. Many players experience both problems simultaneously on different games.
Read more: How accurate is playtime tracking?.