My Steam library contains 445 games, of which only 134 have ever been played. You can get that info from the Steam Calculator by entering the URL of your profile on Steam. While my library of games has grown since I posted my Steam Calculator results in 2014, the percentage of un-played games has stayed roughly the same at 70%. But some things have gotten worse.

One of those things is age and memory. I recently got a mail from a reader who recommended that I should try out Trials of Fire. So I looked up the game on YouTube, and it looked really interesting. And when I looked on Steam it turned out that I had bought it in Early Access in 2019, never played it, and then completely forgotten about it.

The other thing that has gotten worse is that even if I mostly buy games on Steam when they are heavily discounted, there are now much cheaper ways to play these games. A lot of the games that I have in my Steam library I now also own as free games in the Epic games store, or have access to for free as part of my XBox game pass for PC subscription. Yeah, I only paid 23 Euro for Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire back in 2019. But I still haven't played it, and now I could play it for free on the game pass.

The underlying fundamental problem is that there are now so many platforms with so many games, that even if you concentrate on your favorite genres, you still can't play them all. Some of the games that were un-played in 2014 are still un-played, and are probably so outdated by now that I'll never actually play them. On the other hand the Steam Calculator says that my collection is worth between $2,000 and $6,000, depending on whether I bought games at their highest or their lowest price. As I rarely buy at the highest price, let's say $4,000. And I have been on Steam since 2008, so $300 per year. That is still affordable for me, so I don't have to feel too bad about the waste.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:05 PM Permanent Link