www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
My Steam Library
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 Some of the games that were un-played in 2014 are still un-played, and are probably so outdated by now that I'll never actually play them.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
I didn't even join the Epic Store (I think it's due to a primeval fear of free offers) and while I saw that they gave away Into the Breach shortly after I bought it, I didn't mind because it was good enough that I preferred to have paid the devs. There are probably more that I bought - I prefer not to look. Anyway I tend to like older or indie games which generally start off cheap.
Looking at my library, there are just two games I've never played, both of them free games. Some I haven't finished (although not many) but that's a different story. Usually I start playing any game I download as soon as it's installed. If I didn't want to play it immediately I wouldn't have downloaded it. The exception are free games which I do download in the expectation I might play them but even then it would be very rare that I wouldn't at least try them immediately.
It's not like most of these games are going anywhere. I can't see the point of storing them on my computer if I'm not going to play them when they are effectively already stored for me on someone else's computer. Of course, then I leave them on my computer after I've stopped playing them so it's a bit of a false economy that way...
@Tobold wait until you hear about an interesting game, load it up from your aging library, and discover you sank X number of hours in to it ten years ago and have no memory of it! Happened to me at least once so far. I've had Steam going since it's inception in....what, 2004?....and am at around 915 games right now. Wonder how many people like me are thinking of ways they can quietly migrate their account access to our progeny so the legacy can continue....
<< Home
