My Steam library lists 316 games. It’s actually more because several of the games are actually compilations of games. It’s probably still less than 10,000, though.
316 games is a lot of games. When I first started buying computer games for my Atari 400 back in 1982 they cost anywhere from $40-50 each. Sales were rare, so rare I seemed to have missed nearly all of them. When you paid that much for games two things happened as a result:
- You didn’t buy a whole lot of games
- You were very choosy about what you did buy
I once crazily indulged myself by picking up two games at the same time. It was back in 1989 and the games were Populous and SimCity (both for my Amiga).
I chose wisely that day.
But with taxes, it came to over $100. Even for someone working full-time it wasn’t exactly couch change.
Today, all of that has been blown away by Steam and other digital stores offering more games at (much) lower prices. The Steam Summer Sale is on as I type this and some of the games list for under $2. That’s 1% of what I paid for SimCity (SimCity 4 can be had for $4.99). This has made it absurdly easy to collect a giant pile of games if you exercise a little patience and wait for sales and I’ve accumulated more games than I could ever play. And I will accumulate more.
Which ones do I play? Which precious few do I actually engage in so that I can at least claim a tiny dent in that massive backlog?
None of them.
I have reached peak Steam backlog absurdity. I still play some World of Warcraft and a Mahjong on the iPad but the Steam games remain untouched. Okay, I will sometimes start up a game or two, sometimes an old classic like Titan Quest or a new title like The Long Dark. But it never lasts long. Has my attention span turned to mud? Am I paralyzed by too many choices? Do I worry that I’ll play the “wrong” game? The one that’s kind of buggy and janky, instead of the one that purrs along, doling out its rewards efficiently? Yes! Yes to all these, and more.
I don’t have a solution or grand insight to offer here but I am thinking more about it as I keep getting email reminders from Steam that 60 games on my wishlist are on sale.
(Also I’m not sure why but I’ve bold-faced the names of the games in this post, Dvorak-style. Man, that suddenly took me back to when I bought actual paper magazines, like PC Magazine.)
