How to Idle Steam Games and Boost Playtime
Idling a game increases its playtime hours without you needing to actually play it. This is useful for reaching the playtime needed to start receiving trading card drops, padding your Steam profile stats, or simply keeping a game "running" in the background.
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You can idle a maximum of 32 games simultaneously, across every SGI feature combined (manual idling, Auto-Idle, Card Farming, and Achievement Unlocker). This limit is set by the Steam client.
Start Idling a Game
Click Your Games in the sidebar
Click below a game's image to begin idling it. You can do this for multiple games
Click Idling Games in the sidebar to see everything currently idling, along with how long each has been running
The Idling Page
Every game currently idling — whether started manually, or by Auto-Idle, Card Farming, or the Achievement Unlocker — shows up on the Idling Games page, grouped into a section per feature. If a game is claimed by more than one feature at once (e.g. manually started while also queued for Auto-Idle), it's only shown once, under whichever feature has priority.
Stopping Idling
To stop a single game, click its stop button on either Your Games or Idling Games.
To stop everything one feature is idling, click that section's Stop button on the Idling Games page. To stop every idling game across every feature at once, click Stop all in the page header.
Idling only increases playtime hours — it does not automatically unlock achievements or farm trading cards. For those, see Achievement Unlocker and Card Farming
Additional Information
When you idle a game, SGI opens a background helper process for each game to register it as active with Steam (or, when signed in with Steam, announces it via one shared session instead of a process per game). You don't need to manage these yourself — they clean up automatically when you stop idling or exit SGI.