How to get "last played on" for Steam game using Steam API

Question

I'm developing an App that uses public Steam API for collect some information. Currently I retrieve the achievements by calling GetPlayerAchievements (v0001) and total hours played calling GetOwnedGames (v0001). This works fine.

But now I need to known also what was the last played data from a game, for example if you enter on a profile page you can see this info in html page (http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/your_steam_id_here/)

Reviewing the Steam API documentation I cannot find any api call to retrieve this information. So, can this only be obtained scraping the user profile web?

Solution

Surely, this data must exist within Valve's servers, but they just don't expose it for whatever reason. For now, it appears that this data is only available from the Steam client on a user's PC. After some digging, I was able to find that lastplayed timestamps are available from the following file:

\steam\userdata\{steam_id}\config\localconfig.vdf

Note, the .vdf file is a text file that can be opened in a text editor. Here's an example of one of the timestamps (Just Cause 3):

"225540"
{
    "LastPlayed"        "1466894369"
}

The timestamp is in epoch format and translates to 6/25/2016, 6:39:29 PM GMT-4:00 DST

You could have users upload this file from their computer and then you could parse it on your server to get the last played timestamps. It's not ideal, but it is a start.

I'm not sure what your programming language of choice is for your project, but here are some VDF parsers that can get you started:
C#:
https://github.com/sanmadjack/VDF
NodeJS:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/vdf
Python:
https://gist.github.com/strycore/5735482

EDIT April 29, 2017:
I have now discovered that it's possible to scrape this information from a user's steam games page: http://steamcommunity.com/id/pcmantinker/games/?tab=all

By inspecting the source code of the page, I noticed that there is a JavaScript object for rendering the games. Within this object, each game has a "last_played" field available. One entry looks like this:

{
   "appid":346110,
   "name":"ARK: Survival Evolved",
   "logo":"http:\/\/cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com\/steamcommunity\/public\/images\/apps\/346110\/58a660ddb7ed1864656ec65e4c18d6edd3bbf512.jpg",
   "friendlyURL":346110,
   "availStatLinks":{
      "achievements":true,
      "global_achievements":true,
      "stats":false,
      "leaderboards":false,
      "global_leaderboards":false
   },
   "hours":"0.5",
   "hours_forever":"84",
   "last_played":1492447993
}

In order to parse this information, you'll need to find the beginning and the end of the string and then parse the JSON to an object you can manipulate. At this time, the beginning of the string is "var rgGames = [" and the end of the string is "];". I know this not ideal, but it does allow you to obtain this information without the need for the Steam client to be installed.

Comments

[Edgar]

That's a nice trick. However, depending on the app it might not have access to the file system.

[Cameron Tinker]

I imagine that the appropriate file permissions could be granted through some sort of elevation during installation. Most application installers require elevation in order to change the file system, add registry keys, etc.

[Cameron Tinker]

I've updated my answer to include a nicer approach for getting last played timestamps from a webpage. This should be the preferred method as it doesn't require Steam to be installed on the user's machine.

[panta82]

This only works if you are logged into Steam. I wouldn't like to have scraper try to do that, Steam is pretty fiddly regarding security

[Cameron Tinker]

I just tested my JavaScript method and verified that my account doesn't need to be logged in for my profile. Could it be a privacy setting per user?