“Last Played” date always 1 day behind on Steam

[Caan]

I'd like to report that whenever I play on Steam the “Last Played” date is logged as the previous day, even though my time zone is set correctly. I usually play late at night...

 

[x3sphere]

It seemingly matches what Steam is showing here though?

Unfortunately we don't have access to the full last played timestamps anymore, Valve got rid of them in the API around late 2023. Only the specific day is visible to us now, same as what's shown on the steamcommunity.com profile pages. When you visit the same page on the Steam website does it show the correct day? https://steamcommunity.com/id/notCaan/

That said, I guess I could try approximating it with a better estimate whenever we detect the hours played changes.

 

[Caan]

However, when I check my profile in a browser, it shows the correct date. It must be a time-zone issue.

 

[Caan]

I looked into it further and discovered that the issue began around March this year. Previous games showed the correct “Last Played” date, but every Steam game played since March is logged one day early on my Exophase profile.

I have no entries between February 22 and March 8, so it begun between those dates probably.

Other users have reported the same issue:

Post in thread 'Steam not working'

Feb 23, 2025

It seems that Exophase is showing my games as having been played the day before they were actually played. For example I played the Phoenotopia demo today and it shows as having been played yesterday. My time zone is correctly set to Pacific in my settings.

• metalmight

P

Post in thread 'Steam not working'

Feb 27, 2025

Hum, it's showing Feb 22 here. I will say that we don't have access to the exact time played on Steam games anymore though, we only get back the month and day. This might impact the accuracy to some degree since it's missing hours from the timestamp.

Specifically, the only last played dates we have access to are the ones listed on the main Steam profile page here under Recent Activity: https://steamcommunity.com/id/metalmight7/

So you can check if it differs from that, and let me know if so. The timestamps we had access before were accurate down to the second but Valve removed...

• PHANSON16

 

[x3sphere]

I looked into it further and discovered that the issue began around March this year. Previous games showed the correct “Last Played” date, but every Steam game played since March is logged one day early on my Exophase profile.

I have no entries between February 22 and March 8, so it begun between those dates probably.

Other users have reported the same issue:

Thanks for testing. Yes, I do recall some users have reported the same, there was no follow up from them so I didn't look into it much further.

It seems like the Steam website adjusts the timezone according to your location. Issue is I don't think I can "force" it to render in a particular timezone, and since we don't get back the hours/minutes (only the day) there's no way to convert it to the proper time. When they used to provide the timestamp in the API, this wasn't an issue, since the time was in UTC and hours/minutes were included.

It seems like the only way I could get more accurate dates is by approximating from the hours played. Like if it detects a change in hours played from the last time a profile scan was done that same day, then set the last played to the current time. This might not work too well for regular accounts though, since the scans aren't as frequent, but for premium it would work well I think. I will try to set something up soon...

 

[Caan]

Thanks! I played around more with my Steam profile page and noticed that when I open it in a private browsing window, the “Last Played” dates also show up one day behind, even though Steam correctly detects my location and time-zone (I checked the session cookies). Just a reload of the page immediately corrects the dates to the proper ones. I don't know if it's any help.

 

[x3sphere]

I have pushed a potential fix. It's only for your user for now, if successful I will roll it out to all. Let me know if it shows the correct date next time you load up a game. Also it won't change the already existing entries, if you want me to manually change those I can.

 

[Caan]

I've checked, and it works as expected. The date is now correct for the title I launched today. Please don't worry about the few remaining mismatched entries in my profile, they'll correct themselves when I launch them going forward.

Thank you very much, you're the best!