I recently played my 3200th match, and I wanted to know how much time I spent playing. Originally I guessed that the average match for me took 23 minutes, and guessed from that. Then I remembered that every replay of every match is saved to my computer, so I took from there. I'm not done, but I wanted to share the progress I've made over the last couple days.
Of my 3200 games, I have the replays of 2,974 spread across my current laptop (1,211) and old desktop (1,763). After Inputting all the laptop games from 2019 (I got it on Christmas eve so there were only a few dozen), I started to work on all the PC ones. The replays start in late June 2018, and currently I've got every game on the PC up to June 20th of 2019 logged, save for 12 I've set aside for either being too short or part of an old brawl game mode. I may end up adding them back in later, but for now they're set to the side.
Not including the outlier matches, I've input 1,193 match times. To save time, I've rounded to the nearest minute, since I'm looking for an average and not an exact time. If a match is shorter than 7:30, then it gets thrown out for being too short, otherwise it gets added to the chart
Another thing I noticed is that the average match time has gone up so far, starting around 18-19 minutes to solidly being in the low 20 minute range
I set the spreadsheet up so that it would extrapolate the average time over all the matches in total (minus outliers), as well as to all the matches I can log, and I'm comparing it side by side to all the time I've actually logged so far (Approximately 401.28 hours), to see how close they are.
I don't know why I'm sinking so much time into this but I thought it was interesting, I'll probably post an update once I'm done
