After deciding to take a look at his top played games on Steam, gamer Peacea77 found one he hadn’t played in over half a decade on the list. Not only that, but it had been completely deleted from his computer. “I’d forgotten it existed, honestly,” said Peacea. “But there it is, number five, right under all the ones I play regularly. I haven’t touched it in six years, but it’s not getting surpassed.”

After finding the game on the list, Peacea77 decided to re-download it. “I probably won’t play, but it will just be fun to have it there, you know? I mean, I don’t think I’ll like it, I did delete it after all.” When asked how it got so much play time when it was a game he didn’t like, Peacea said that it was because he downloaded it in beta. “This beta games, you want to feel like you get the most out of them. Like, you’re supporting this small developer, and the game’s changing all the time, so you’re kinda getting a new game all the time. And you want to make it look like the game’s getting a bunch of playtime so the dev keeps working on it, and the publisher doesn’t abandon it. Then you don’t get a beta game, you get a 1.0. So you’re basically paying beta price for a full game.”

When it was suggested that the game got the hours it did just because it was good, Peacea didn’t agree. “Nah, I think it’s just the beta thing,” he said. He added “I suppose I could have been addicted in high school, but as I got older, I grew out if it,” refusing to do the basic math showing he was in his mid-twenties when he stopped.

“Still, maybe I’ll get re-addicted,” he added. “Like, you know how all those thirty-somethings love those learning games from the nineties? The ones for six-year-olds? Maybe that will happen for me. You know, me not actually liking the game, but just liking the memories. Something like that.” Peacea said that was the most likely scenario for actually playing the game, but that it was unlikely that the game would get played at all. “I probably won’t even touch it, I probably delete it again. I already did, so yeah, probably won’t like it,” he repeated.

When asked if he deleted it the first time because he felt was playing it too much, Peacea seemed insulted. “It’s a boring game, okay? I only played because it was in beta, I told you. Or because I was a teenager. Or, I dunno, maybe a girl said it was fun and I just wanted to get my hours up so she’d see that. But it’s definitely lame, and I’m sure that I won’t get addicted again. Not that I was addicted in the first place.” When approached for for comment a week later, Peacea was unreachable, but his Steam account showed that the game’s playtime had already gone up by nearly twenty hours.