The Ever Increasing Backlog

Hello you! Today I want to talk about the mountain of games I have amassed over the years and the problems that arise due to the size of this collection compared to the amount of available time.

So, yesterday I was thinking about starting a new game from my games library on Steam. Scrolling through the list of 660 games, a sinking feeling of dread started to form in the back of my mind: I'll never be able to play everything here, and the list will keep growing and growing. And this is only the Steam library, there are also GOG, Origin (or EA Desktop App, depending on when you are reading this), Uplay, Epic Games Store, PlayStation Store and the Nintendo eShop. Add to that really advantageous subscription services like Humble Choice and Xbox Game Pass and the list increases exponentially.

After some deliberation, I finally settled for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate HD (trademark, copyright, yadda yadda), a PC port of a last generation and 3DS metroidvania game. After I am done with it, which will probably take a while, it will go in the finished games section of my library, never to be touched again, simply because there is nothing more to do with it, I have already experienced everything the game had to offer at that point. Bear in mind, finishing a game, to me, means 100% completion. So far, this section, at least on Steam, contains only about 5 games, other ones being stuck in limbo, because I can't be arsed to get them to that coveted rating of "completed".

Returning from that tangent, these days, games are getting bigger and bigger, and my free time is getting shorter and shorter. You can clearly see how the math doesn't really add up. Even more funnily, I can't easily dedicate to a 100 hour epic, some days I might not be able to play, and remembering what the hell I was up to in that save from a few months ago would take a lot of time, time I would wish to waste by playing the game instead of solving real life detective cases. So, this leaves me with the alternative of shorter games, right? For the most case, yeah, that would be right, but there is a way to avoid the problem, although with the cost of entering a routine: multiplayer games. Self contained half an hour experiences, in the form of matches. These days, the bulk of my gaming is playing Rainbow Six Siege with a few mates, and oh boy, I feel a bit disappointed in the fact that @unacomn was right all those years back, saying that a person without free time goes for multiplayer.

Oh, how I wish I could take the time and actually finish The Witcher 3 or Prey, actually playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance, or even being able to commit to the Divinity series of games. Alas, there is no time in the world for that, so back to strategizing with friends in Siege for that short burst of adrenaline when the plan inevitably fails, on the account of the error brought in by the fact that there are 10 rogue variables, the players and doing one quest at a time in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

All in all, maybe one day I'll muster that free time which was so prevalent just three years ago. Until then, little experiences.

Images: 1(GOG+integrations screenshot), 2(Steam screenshot), 3, 4, 5.