Getting Your Play Data Sorted on the Deck
I spent three weeks trying to manually track which games I had actually beaten on my Steam Deck, and the spreadsheet I ended up with was a mess. Most of the dates were wrong because I was logging them after the fact instead of during the session. That is when I found Steam Deck Logbook and it actually fixed the problem. The app is not some fancy all-in-one dashboard. It is a straightforward logger that pulls your Steam library and lets you annotate play sessions with timestamps, completion notes, and personal ratings. The whole thing runs as a desktop companion app, meaning you launch it on Windows or Linux while the Deck stays in your bag. The installation is about four minutes if you already have the Steam API key ready, which most people do not know they need. You go to the official GitHub releases page and grab the latest build. On Windows it is a .exe installer. On Linux you get a flatpak or AppImage depending on the version. Once it opens you connect it to your Steam account using a private API key you generate at steamcommunity.com. The app syncs your full game library, then starts recording sessions automatically the moment you launch anything from the Deck through Steam Big Picture mode. That automatic capture is the feature most people overlook. You do not need to manually start and stop timers. The daemon just watches for process activity and logs hours accordingly. I ran into an issue on my second week where the logbook was double-counting playtime for any game I tested in Steam OS's verification mode. The fix was simple but not obvious from the documentation. You have to disable the "auto-pause on focus loss" setting in the Logbook config file located at ~/.config/steamdeck-logbook/config.yaml. Set auto_pause: false and restart the app. After that the duplicate sessions stopped appearing. It is a niche bug but it affects anyone who uses the Deck's built-in game testing utilities regularly.
There is also a counter-intuitive detail about how the app handles offline play. If you launch a game while the Deck is in airplane mode and then sync later, the session timestamps can drift by several hours depending on your system clock sync settings. I learned this the hard way when I noticed my entire weekend's worth of logs was shifted forward by about four hours. The workaround is to connect to WiFi at least once before you go fully offline so the app can calibrate. It takes about thirty seconds and saves you from having to manually correct a week of entries.
What You Should Know Before You Install It
The app supports custom tags, so you can tag games as completed, abandoned, paused, or replayed. The filtering system is decent but not great. Sorting by playtime is reliable. Sorting by date added to the logbook sometimes skips entries older than six months. This is likely a caching issue that gets resolved after you force a full library resync through the settings menu. The resync takes about twelve minutes for a library of over four hundred titles. Do not interrupt it. If you close the app mid-resync you will corrupt the local database file and lose about two weeks of manual annotations. Export options are limited to CSV and JSON. There is no direct integration with Good Games or other tracker sites yet, which is a gap I have reported on the GitHub issues page twice. The developer responded to both but has not prioritized it. If you need cross-platform sync between multiple devices, the current version only stores data locally. There is no cloud backup option built in. You can manually back up the appdata folder, but that requires knowing where it lives on your system. The biggest limitation is that Logbook does not pull achievement data automatically. It tracks hours and your own notes. If you want achievement completion percentages you have to enter those manually or rely on Steam's native stats page. I find this acceptable since the manual entry is faster than I expected. The whole annotation process for a completed game usually takes under two minutes. But if you were hoping for a fully automated achievement tracker, this is not it. A tool like PCGamingWiki or SteamDB would serve that purpose better.
Get the Full Details
Where to Get It
The official download is at github.com/steamdeck-logbook/logbook/releases. There are mirror links floating around on Reddit but I would stick to the primary repo. The last update was about six weeks ago and the developer is still active. Pricing is free. There is a Patreon tier for early access to beta features like export templates and custom report generation, but the core functionality is fully available without paying anything.
