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Steam (BETA)
This integration is currently in beta! Changes are not only possible but likely, and bugs may still exist. We welcome any feedback and reports from those who've been invited to test. If you want in contact Beeminder support to let us know and we'll see what we can do!
Steam is a service which lets you buy, manage and play games on a PC.
What can I beemind with Steam?
During the beta, you can beemind the number of hours you spend playing a specific game. You can choose a "Do More" goal (for playing at least a certain amount of your chosen game) or "Do Less" (for setting limits on how much you can play your chosen game).
That means you can use a Steam goal to make sure you're putting in the time to beat your backlogged games... or you can use it to help you limit how much time you play distracting games. You could even make a goal for each for the same game, in order to keep your gaming within certain limits!
We may add total game time as well, but this might be a bit opaque: we'll have to sum it up from all your games, so it might be difficult to know if there's something missing and why. Reasons a game might be missing include having set it to private or hidden it from your library.
When does the goal update?
There are two limitations on the goal updates. The first is that Beeminder doesn't get data constantly in realtime, but rather fetches it at intervals. In this case, doing a manual fetch will update your goal right away with the data from Steam.
However, while you are playing your game, Steam only updates the information available to Beeminder in half-hour increments. It updates immediately once you exit your game.
For a Do More goal, this should work out okay, except that you might need to quit your game just before midnight if you're cutting it close.
For a Do Less goal, we may not be able to fetch data in time to send you reminders if you go over your limit. Do Less goals might be best used with your own timers and alarms to keep track, due to the inherent limitations of the Steam API.
Keywords: autodata integrations, backlogs, gaming, limiting game time