How to log number of times each game has been launched

[ZogZogAkita]

Hi everyone !

I'm wondering if it's possible to get information about number of times emulator or games have been launched last 30 days. I would like to know Top 5 games chosen by my players and share some indicators on a monthly basis to eventually remove some games never played.

[MWGemini]

@ZogZogAkita As far as I know, this is not currently possible. It would require a fairly large change to make it work, but it's possible that it could happen in the not-too-distant future.

[herb_fargus]

@ZogZogAkita you can get a last played and number of times played data from emulationstation but you'd need custom scripts like onstart for runcommand to do monthly logs

[celly]

@herb_fargus Using the default Carbon theme with scrapped artwork and metadata, i'm pretty sure it will list how many times a particular ROM has been launched. I know that's not exactly what the OP wanted but, it's something.

[MWGemini]

@celly Most themes support displaying the number of times a game has been played but there currently does not exist a way to support things like tracking individual plays, number of hours spent playing, time spent playing this week/month/year/etc. To track all of those things would require switching from an XML based data system to a real database. There has been a discussion about doing this (search for "Metadata improvements"), but it's not yet in the works. Hopefully soon, as it's one of the big things I want to see improved.

[lucienstorm]

I believe i’m looking to do a similar thing. I won’t be able to monitor this daily, and i’d like to monitor the popularity of the games that get played, so i can remove unplayed ones to save space. (This is entirely in a non-profit situation, btw) I want to update the games periodically, to keep it fresh, and have games that people would be interested in.
My theory, based on what has been said here so far, is that i might be able to find something that will monitor the numbers in the files that count amount of plays, and then have it report that to a spread sheet, and upload that to a cloud folder or email it to me. I will update this conversation if i’m able to figure this out. Thank you for the inspiration.

[mitu]

@lucienstorm Use the Runcommand onstart script (https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Runcommand/#runcommand-onstart-and-runcommand-onend-scripts) and log the start of the game to a text file. Put in the onstart script something like

echo "Started $3 at `date`, for system $1" >> $HOME/playcount.txt

and then inspect the playcount.txt file periodically.