Play time
Play time is the cumulative number of seconds osu! has recorded a player as spending in gameplay, summed across their whole account history for one game mode. The osu! API exposes it as play_time on a user's statistics object, mapped from the server-side field total_seconds_played, and profiles and trackers divide it by 3,600 to display hours. Play time only ever increases. Unlike play count, it weights a seven-minute marathon far more heavily than a thirty-second map, which makes it the more honest single figure for how much osu! somebody has actually played.
What the number measures
osu! stores play time as a whole number of seconds and the API hands it over in that form. Every hours figure you see on a profile or a tracker is that number divided by 3,600. On osu!'s own side the field is named total_seconds_played, and the name describes its scope: seconds played, not seconds with the client open. Browsing song select, downloading beatmaps and sitting in chat do not contribute.
The figure is monotonic. There is no decay, no seasonal reset and no mechanism for reducing it. It is also entirely outside the competitive system: nothing in pp or the global rank ordering reads play time, so a player with 3,000 hours and a player with 300 can sit at exactly the same rank.
Play time against play count
Play count counts attempts; play time counts seconds. Dividing one by the other gives an average length per play, and that ratio says more about how somebody plays than either number does alone. Consider two players who have both submitted 50,000 plays:
| Player | Play count | Play time | Average seconds per play |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 50,000 | 1,000 hours | 72 |
| B | 50,000 | 1,800 hours | 130 |
Player A's 72-second average is the signature of short maps and heavy retrying. Player B's 130 seconds points to longer maps and fewer restarts. Neither pattern is better, but the pair of numbers separates them in a way that play count on its own cannot.
One figure per game mode
osu!'s statistics block is scoped to a single ruleset. Requesting a user's osu! (standard) statistics returns the play time, play count, level and score totals for standard only. osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania each carry their own independent set. A dedicated mania player can show thousands of hours in mania and almost none in standard, and both figures are correct.
TrackMyOsu tracks osu!standard, so every play time it snapshots, charts and compares is standard play time. If the hours on a profile look low against what you remember playing, check which mode the number came from before assuming the tracking is wrong.
What play time does not tell you
Three things get read into play time that are not in it:
- It is not skill. Hours accumulate at the same rate whether the maps are 2★ or 8★. Difficulty reaches your profile through pp, never through time.
- It is not account age. An account opened years ago with 40 hours played has 40 hours of play time. The intervening years contribute nothing.
- It does not convert evenly into progress. Repeating one map for an hour adds an hour of play time and adds to total score, but unless an attempt beats your existing score on that map it adds nothing to ranked score and nothing to your top plays.
Read it as a good approximation of gameplay hours maintained by the server rather than as a precisely audited stopwatch.
Play time inside a TrackMyOsu session
Every snapshot TrackMyOsu takes stores play time in seconds alongside pp, rank and the score totals. Subtracting the start snapshot from the stop snapshot gives the gameplay seconds contained in that session, which is nearly always smaller than the wall-clock time the session was open. Song select, breaks, retry decisions and chat all pass without adding a second.
That gap is the interesting part. A two-hour sitting containing fifty minutes of play time and a two-hour sitting containing ninety minutes are very different sessions, and the difference never shows up in the pp figures. Because sessions are kept permanently, play time in hours can be compared across an entire history rather than only the most recent week.
See also
- Play count — The number of plays you have submitted, failed attempts included.
- Total score — Every submitted score added together, including failed attempts and repeats.
- Level — A cosmetic milestone derived entirely from total score, with no effect on pp or rank.
Related guides
Longer explainers that use this term: browse all osu! guides, or start with Understanding osu! pp, How to read your osu! stats and Star rating explained.
Sources
Definitions follow the official osu! wiki and the ppy/osu source. Session figures come from TrackMyOsu's own tracked-session database.
By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-13.
Track your own osu! sessions
TrackMyOsu snapshots your pp, rank and top plays when you start playing, then shows exactly what changed when you stop. Every session is kept permanently. Free, no install, no password — it uses osu! OAuth.