Despite considering myself a “gamer”, I realized I had only played ~5 hours of video-games in the whole year 2022 and ~6 hours in 2021. Honestly, these numbers made me a bit sad to see... You can't “improve” what you don't measure, so I started looking for low-effort ways to measure the amount of play time while getting back into actually playing video-games.

Surprisingly, the Nintendo Switch didn’t offer any fine-grained play activity data… until the Nintendo Store app was released a few weeks ago with high granularity play activity data! Now all I’d need is to export the data somehow.

This article covers how I used Python and EasyOCR to create a simple workflow converting screenshots of the Nintendo Store app into a queryable SQLite database with all my play activity data.

Read more: https://sethmlarson.dev/nintendo-switch-play-activity-ocr