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Unplayed games in my Steam library...

Some people are really stingy when it comes to buying games, even very cheap ones. Others will buy tons of games, especially if they are on sale, or in huge bundles (which may themselves be on sale), and thus amass hundreds and hundreds of games. I suppose I'm somewhere in the middle of these two extremes: I prefer to buy games that are on sale (especially in the case of triple-A games), and sometimes I'll buy big bundles if they are relatively cheap. I have amassed a somewhat "medium-sized" library of games on Steam.

Some people will usually try every single game they purchase immediately, and play a bit of the beginning of each. I suppose that this makes sense from one particular perspective: If for example the game doesn't work, or is otherwise utterly broken (or perhaps it's some kind of asset-flip scam), it can be refunded. Once you have owned the game for over 2 weeks, that option will become unavailable.

I don't really like to do that, even though I'm painfully aware that I'm losing the refunding option. It makes as little sense to me as eg. buying 50 movies and watching the first 10 minutes of each one. That would be rather nonsensical. In the exact same way it makes little sense to me to just start games and play a bit from the beginning of each one, like a conveyor belt or fast food system. It ruins the experience, I'd say. (I suppose it's not exactly as bad as with the movie example, but still...) I like playing each game as its own full experience, rather than sampling the beginning of dozens of them.

Also, I have noticed that if I stop playing a game mid-way through, and move to some other game (at least on the same platform), with the intention of "finishing that game later", in the vast majority of cases that "later" never comes. New interesting games come out at a faster pace than I could ever play them, and I really, really rarely go back to an unfinished game later. There are only so many hours I can spend on playing video games. Perhaps if I had unlimited amount of time it could be a bit different, but real life is real life, and it's limited. The Earth doesn't stop, and neither does society and life. A sad reality, but that's just how it goes.

Thus, what invariably happens is that I end up purchasing more games than I have physical time to play. The list of unplayed games just keeps growing and growing over time. Games that looked interesting when I purchased them (often for very cheap), but which end up in the unplayed games limbo.

Sometimes I try to shorten that list by making a video game marathon. For example during summer vacation I sometimes take it as a task to purge that list as much as I can, by just dedicating inhumane amounts of time to just playing the games in a conveyor belt fashion. Optimally I spend less than a week per game, preferably only two or three days. If a game turns out to be boring, I just stop playing it and move to the next.

This helps somewhat, but I never get to purge the list completely. There simply are too many games to go through every single one of them. And of course the next Steam mega-sale comes, and the list gets flooded once again.

First world problems...

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