The Steam Backlog Reduction Initiative

It has come to my attention lately that I have a whole buttload of unplayed games on Steam. Like, so many. I’ve been keeping a running tab of all the games I purchase since April of 2015, and here’s a snippet of it just to give you an idea.

gameslog

There is a ton of grey on this list, and so many entries are marked with the B for Bundle. If I were to remove all of the game that I’d purchased in bundles and from Steam sales, it would be significantly shorter. Keep in mind, of course, that nearly all of these came at dirt-cheap prices. But those small dollar amounts do add up, and I’m left wondering how much I’ve spent on games that I’ll likely never even install, much less play.

While free time is at a premium, and I don’t necessarily think that the best use of my time is playing games that I don’t care about, I am bothered by the copious blocks of red on my spreadsheet. It’s a problem that could be easily solved by simply deleting said spreadsheet, but I can’t help it. I love the data.

There is some merit to trying out new games to see what clicks, though. I’ve spent much of my life playing through demo discs (ahh, the good old days) and random demos pulled from the various console shops. There was a point in time where a friend and I would randomly load up SNES ROMs in hopes of finding some hidden gems. Not to mention way, way back in the day when one could rent whole video games for a few days at the measly cost of $5. So there is a bit of a precedent for booting up random games for a few minutes to see what they’re all about.

That’s the mentality I’m going to take here: I want to at least try out a large portion of these games just to see if any of them stick. I don’t necessarily need to beat them. Heck, I don’t even always beat the games that I really like. I just want to comb through the list and find out what kind of games are hiding out in there. And of course, I’m sure that at least a few of them will be worth writing about.

So that’s where we’re at. These projects that I start never usually last very long, so expect this to end probably by the fall or so. But I’m going to try anyway!

I should probably do this as a podcast or video series or some other more current format, but whatever. I’m old-school, so I’m just going to write about anything that tickles my fancy.

Leave a Reply