How your statement is calculated

1. What we read from Steam

One call to Steam's official API, with your consent through their sign-in button: the list of games you own and how long you played each one. That's it. Not your friends, not your purchases, not your messages, not your inventory.

Your profile has to be public at the moment you connect. Steam refuses to hand over playtime otherwise, and your statement would come back empty.

We keep three things: your Steam ID, the result of the calculation, and the wallet you link if you link one. Nothing else.

2. Following the ownership chain

Every game has a publisher. Every publisher belongs to someone. We climb until we hit a company listed on a stock exchange — if there is one at the top.

Game	Publisher	Listed owner
Skyrim	Bethesda Softworks	Microsoft
Borderlands	Gearbox	Take-Two, since 2024
Destiny 2	Bungie	Sony, since 2022
ARK: Survival Evolved	Studio Wildcard	Snail Games, Nasdaq
Beat Saber	Beat Games	Meta, since 2019
Elden Ring	Bandai Namco	Bandai Namco, Tokyo
Counter-Strike 2	Valve	nobody

The map covers 265 companies and more than 430 publisher names, and it gets corrected continuously. Recent acquisitions count as of today, not as of when you played: your 2019 Gearbox hours pay Take-Two, because Take-Two owns Gearbox now.

A publisher we haven't mapped yet shows as unidentified. It gets added within days.

3. The three walls

A company's wall says nothing about whether its games are good. It says one thing only: whether you are allowed to own a piece of it.

Owned

A share of this company exists as a token on Robinhood Chain. Your hours convert into it directly. Verified against Robinhood's own public asset registry.

Held

The company is publicly traded somewhere — Tokyo, Paris, Stockholm, Hong Kong — but no share reaches this chain. Two cases. If a country index that genuinely holds the company is available, we pay from that index and say so: "paid from the South Korea index, which holds Krafton". Otherwise your value is set aside. See below.

Locked

The company is private. It appears in no index anywhere, because indexes only contain listed companies. Nothing is possible, and we don't pretend otherwise. Nothing is held for these — holding for a company that will never list would be a lie. You can leave those hours on the record, or redirect them to a company that pays. See redirecting.

4. How your share is worked out

We don't pay per hour. We pay per square root of hours, capped at 5,000 hours. Ten thousand hours is worth 100 units; a hundred hours is worth 10. Your first hours count most, and a bought account with a huge total is worth barely more than a normal one.

Every six hours an epoch closes. Each asset has a budget — 5% of its balance — split between the players who claimed during that epoch, in proportion to their units. People who don't claim don't dilute anyone.

Nothing has been paid out yet. There is no treasury, no contract and no epoch running. Your units are counted from the moment you connect, but what a unit is worth depends entirely on what the treasury holds on the day it opens. We won't put a number on that before it exists.

When it does open, the intent is a floor on the first claim so that a first payout is a real moment rather than dust, and a one-cent minimum per payout — below that it accumulates until it crosses the line.

5. Value that waits

Held hours are not lost. Their dollar value is set aside inside the contract, in short-term US Treasuries, which earn a real return while they wait. The day an index covering those companies reaches this chain, it converts and pays out retroactively, with whatever it earned.

You can decide at any moment not to wait, and send those hours to a company that does pay. You're paid immediately and your held value is released.

Redirecting

Two walls carry a choice. Held companies: keep waiting, or take the units now. Locked companies: leave the hours on the record, or redirect them. Nothing is redirected by default. Every redirection on a statement goes to one destination, picked once, from two families kept apart on the page:

• a company you already own — one that took your time and pays you back;
• the hardware that ran it — NVIDIA, and only NVIDIA. See below.

Redirected units keep their full weight — the square root of the hours, capped — whichever wall they come from. Locked hours are never held: redirected or not, they never enter the reserve. Your choices are saved in your browser, and on our side once you sign them with a wallet.

The hardware exception

NVIDIA published none of your games. It ran them: by Steam's own hardware survey, about three PC gamers out of four play on its GPUs. The line on the statement says all of them; strictly, it is most of them, and the rest ran on AMD or Intel. We keep the line because it names the one thing true of hours nobody can pay — the Valve hours, the private-studio hours: they still ran on something, and that something is public and reachable on this chain.

NVIDIA is not a publisher. It sits in no wall, appears on no statement, and never receives an hour by attribution. It exists on this site in exactly one place: as a redirect target, kept in a separate list that the game-to-company map never reads. Token: NVDA on Robinhood Chain, 0xd0601CE157Db5bdC3162BbaC2a2C8aF5320D9EEC, checked against the public registry on 13 September 2026.

Why we stop there. AMD runs a share of the machines, Intel a share of the processors, and memory makers sell a commodity no game is tied to. All real, all partial. The day this list holds two names it is a hardware portfolio, and a portfolio is what this project refuses to be: hours name a company, they don't buy a basket. One name, one reason, one line. If NVIDIA's token ever leaves the chain, the line leaves with it — we won't replace it with the next best guess.

6. The cap

The contract refuses any payout beyond 5% of each asset's balance per epoch. This is a rule inside the contract, not a rule on our server: even a stolen signing key can't drain the treasury. At worst it could overpay real players for a few epochs.

The honest consequence: rewards slow down when the treasury shrinks. They can't come from nowhere.

7. Against bought accounts

Old Steam accounts with thousands of hours sell online for a few tens of euros. Here's why buying them earns nothing.

• Square-root weighting makes big accounts barely more valuable than normal ones.
• One Steam account links to one wallet, permanently.
• Account older than a year, Steam level 5 minimum, no VAC ban.
• First claim available 24 hours after linking.
• The cap limits the daily total: ten bought accounts return a few dollars a day for several hundred euros spent, and the rate falls as the treasury drains.

It isn't airtight. It's economically pointless, and it's written down.

8. The $HOURS token

The token is a key, not a reward. It promises no yield and pays none. Your first claim is free. To claim later epochs, you hold $HOURS.

It launches on Pons v2 paired against a tokenized stock. The consequence: every trade of the token pays a fee in shares, straight into the treasury, with no human involved. That's the only asset that refills itself. The others are deposited by us or by sponsors.

Full supply on the launch curve. No team allocation. Liquidity locked permanently at graduation.

9. Open data

Everything the site shows is available without a key. Recompute whatever you like.

Endpoint	Returns
/api/statement?id=<steamid64>	The full statement for a public account — the same JSON the result page renders
/api/debt	The aggregate ledger: every hour read so far, by wall and by company, across all statements. Anonymous by construction
/api/map	The full publisher-to-company map: companies, walls, aliases, index baskets, the reserve
/api/treasury	Not yet — there is no contract to read
/api/epochs	Not yet — no epoch has run

The ledger only exists once a database sits behind the site; until then /api/debt answers {"configured": false} rather than a zero that would be false.

If you find a mistake in the map, it's public and it's fixable. Tell us.