Are your number of unplayed games increasing? And is that a problem?

[Squidgy]

Yes my backlog is increasing but is it a problem? truth be told i'm not sure. I have grown to be quite disinterested with playing videogames recently and tend to stick with the select few I truly enjoy instead of playing the ones collecting dust on my shelf.

Part of the reason may be because i am gearing up to make the generation leap and purchase a ps4 soon. I hope that doing so will inject a little more enthusiasm into me wanting to carry on this hobby and not turn out to be a waste of money.

 

[kasperbbs]

Yeah, the list is getting pretty big and i don't think that i will ever bother clearing it. It's mostly made up of bland games that i didn't have the chance to play for a while and then i lost interest in them as time went by. Recently i had to reinstall windows so now it's even less likely that i will ever play some of them again. It baffles me how i managed to spend so much time on a few games that i had as a kid, i seem to lose interest pretty quickly now.

 

[BearShark]

I tend to go in cycles of having too many games stacked up, and then none at all once I finish them. I'm currently at the point where I've bought all of the games that I really want, and now it's finally time to enjoy them.

 

[veloper]

I have a backlog of... ZERO.

The reason for this is because I don't use Steam, and even if I did I'd rather pay $60 for a game I really really want than pay $4 for a game I'm incredibly hesitant on in the first place. With how much people talk about their Steam backlog, I often wonder if Valve is a retailer or a con artist.

Those same $60 games are often in the range of $10 - $20 on Steam and all you have to do is wait a year and then check the xmas sale, or summer sale or autumn sale, whatever is on then.
A game being a bit older doesn't suddenly make it crap. There is a lot of crap, but there's also enough good stuff to fill all your time with.

Except that if I wanted the game, I would have bought it on release. I don't think I've ever had the thought "Hey, this new game from my favorite dev just came out. But if I wait a painful, agonizing year, I could get it for a fifth of the price and all I'll have to do is install a shitty distribution program!"

Then I think "Oh wait, what? I can just buy it now since the number of games I buy is actually low enough that $60 for a game isn't going to be that big a hit to my wallet? Well how about that?"

That's just silly, especially the "painful, agonizing" part. It's just games.
And when you have too many, it's not like you'll ever get bored for lack of anything different to play.

 

[COMaestro]

I have quite the backlog of games at this point due to PS+, and I'm not even going to count the various games I have on my PC through Steam that I don't even have hooked up anymore. Even if you don't count the PS+ free games, though, I still have a good number of games I would like to go back and play/finish. It gets a lot harder to have free time to game, though, when you have kids, especially once they get old enough that you need to worry about what you play in front of them. For instance, I wouldn't play God of War games in front of my 2 year old at this point. I tend to get 1-2 hours a day of console gaming at best, usually much less than that. I was almost done with Sleeping Dogs (free through PS+) when I picked up Batman Arkham Origins. Now I'm 30ish percent of the way through it, and Christmas is coming, where I anticipate getting a few more games.

Thank God for my Vita though. Let's me get in a little bit of gaming during lunch at work, and I can play it while the TV is being used, which usually gives me at least an extra hour of gaming each weekday. Once I actually have some games for my PS4, I see the remote play functionality being used a LOT.

 

[fenrizz]

I have a backlog of... ZERO.

The reason for this is because I don't use Steam, and even if I did I'd rather pay $60 for a game I really really want than pay $4 for a game I'm incredibly hesitant on in the first place. With how much people talk about their Steam backlog, I often wonder if Valve is a retailer or a con artist.

Those same $60 games are often in the range of $10 - $20 on Steam and all you have to do is wait a year and then check the xmas sale, or summer sale or autumn sale, whatever is on then.
A game being a bit older doesn't suddenly make it crap. There is a lot of crap, but there's also enough good stuff to fill all your time with.

Except that if I wanted the game, I would have bought it on release. I don't think I've ever had the thought "Hey, this new game from my favorite dev just came out. But if I wait a painful, agonizing year, I could get it for a fifth of the price and all I'll have to do is install a shitty distribution program!"

Then I think "Oh wait, what? I can just buy it now since the number of games I buy is actually low enough that $60 for a game isn't going to be that big a hit to my wallet? Well how about that?"

That's just silly, especially the "painful, agonizing" part. It's just games.
And when you have too many, it's not like you'll ever get bored for lack of anything different to play.

The thing is that I DON'T have too many. I don't have a Steam Library of 200 games. I've got 30 spread across discs, cards and Origin that goes back fifteen years. So I don't feel the need to conserve my money for games because I don't buy them in such volumes.

Someone tells me "Hey look! GMod's on sale!"
I say "Hooray for GMod, it's still garbage no matter how cheap it is."

A good game or a bad game is still good or bad no matter the price. EA could try and charge me $90 for the next Mass Effect title, and I'll be really tempted to buy it because the series is just that damn good. I know I'm gonna enjoy it no matter how much they want to gouge out of me. Meanwhile, Team Fortress is completely free, and that doesn't make the dry, dull, painfully boring shooting any less dreary.

How do you tell a developer who's putting his game on sale for $3 that it doesn't matter what the price is, you don't want their game? More importantly, how do you tell that to someone who cannot fathom why I wouldn't want Steam on my PC?

I'd rather pay $60 for the next Mass Effect or Kingdom Hearts than pay $5 for Dear Esther or Every Day The Same Dream.

Or do like me, buy good games for cheap.

Also, out of curiosity, you hate Steam with a flaming passion but use Origin? Why is that?

 

[Saelune]

Well, I like having the options...but I get distracted easily. I want to play through entire old series, but I get distracted at some point. Maybe if Im lucky, a game just grabs me, like say, Arkham Asylum which I bought and beat while it was still on sale for a weekend. But then say, AC: Brotherhood, I keep gaining interest, then getting distracted. Im currently on a Dynasty Warriors kick though, but eventually some other game will pull me away. If I had more focus I wouldn't mind though.

 

[InvisibleMan]

My back log is definitely increasing, while my game purchases have been decreasing! One of the main reasons I am not going to get a PS4 or XboxOne this or next year is that I have still dozens of games to get through on my current systems.
I will get a Wii U for Christmas with about six games because... children. And I love the games that are coming out for that system. But I am not buying any more games after Christmas until 2015! (Well, maybe two or three...) Even if I stick to this promise, I calculate I will not have finished with my back log by the end of 2014... so sad.

 

[BrotherRool]

Having a big backlog for consumers isn't bad I don't think; although it is a bit shitty for devs/pubs because we can sit on our pile and wait until they stop being dicks about enforcing policies on the new games we might want to play.

It's the increasing part more than the big part which may or may not be a problem. I guess ideally you'd have a big but non-increasing backlog of games, that way you've got a lot of flexibility, a huge range of games to choose from and more easily ignore developers putting out sub-awesome games.

But if you've got an increasing backlog then that means you could do that, but you're not. (Unless new games are getting consistently better and so you buy those instead of playing older ones. But I doubt that). It means that whilst you own better games that you haven't played, you're still buying new games that aren't as good, and then on top of that you're buying more new games than you've actually got time to play.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Having a big backlog for consumers isn't bad I don't think; although it is a bit shitty for devs/pubs because we can sit on our pile and wait until they stop being dicks about enforcing policies on the new games we might want to play.

It's the increasing part more than the big part which may or may not be a problem. I guess ideally you'd have a big but non-increasing backlog of games, that way you've got a lot of flexibility, a huge range of games to choose from and more easily ignore developers putting out sub-awesome games.

But if you've got an increasing backlog then that means you could do that, but you're not. (Unless new games are getting consistently better and so you buy those instead of playing older ones. But I doubt that). It means that whilst you own better games that you haven't played, you're still buying new games that aren't as good, and then on top of that you're buying more new games than you've actually got time to play.

oh I get what you're saying, and I probably should've rephrased my answer better. I do have an increasing backlog in size that will never fully be played, but the fact that I have hundreds of games at my fingertips makes it much easier for me to snuff off devs/pubs who are being dicks and stuff (usually some game, somewhere at some point in time, is being sold at a clearance sale price...AND I WILL HAVE IT. As long as the devs/pubs aren't giant cocks.) So it isn't a problem to me that I spend more money than I will actually end up using (in terms of games being actually played).

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I used to have a massive backlog as I had a ton of games that I didn't want due to many bundles, I recently went through them all and just tried and cut out most of them. Now I only have 25 games to play, although only 10 of them haven't been started so maybe I'll get to finish the.... steam winter sale. Fuck!

We just might have reached the point where games need to become more expensive in order for us to actually enjoy our purchases. It doesn't matter how good the deal is when there's only so many hours in the day.

Hello again. I'm not stalking you, I promise! Perhaps a better alternative would be shorter games that are really well done like bastion.

Get out of here stalker!

But yes. It's like movies. While you can have fun watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, none of us have the time to watch nothing but movies that run to almost three hours.

 

[JoshGod]

snip
Get out of here stalker!

But yes. It's like movies. While you can have fun watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, none of us have the time to watch nothing but movies that run to almost three hours.

Indeed while I have enjoyed the Hobbit I don't remember much of it other than it was visually fantastic, and as such have no interest in re-watching it and little interest in part two. Would you say it's worth watching? back on topic I don't think the issue is length but the quality of what's there, if something is amazing throughout but really long it's still going to be watched/played over and over.

 

[Olas]

Ya, having a job, school, and responsibilities doesn't help, then there's the fact that I'm not exactly eager to play most of these games to start with since I bought them because they were nearly free and not because I really wanted them.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

snip
Get out of here stalker!

But yes. It's like movies. While you can have fun watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, none of us have the time to watch nothing but movies that run to almost three hours.

Indeed while I have enjoyed the Hobbit I don't remember much of it other than it was visually fantastic, and as such have no interest in re-watching it and little interest in part two. Would you say it's worth watching? back on topic I don't think the issue is length but the quality of what's there, if something is amazing throughout but really long it's still going to be watched/played over and over.

Oh yes. I've seen a person that said he really couldn't stand the first movie say that he loved the second. I plan to take a friend to it this weekend as an X-mas gift and intend to do so in 3D for the main reason of seeing Smaug in 3D because he is terrifying.

But the movie itself I think is very good, and I've enjoyed the extensions they've done to parts of the story. I think you should at least give it a good thought over whether you should see it.

Back on topic as well though, you are right to an extent, but then there are games like the Dark Cloud games, which I adore, but can't seem to bring myself to finish again because they're too damn long. But you are right, if you love a game then you want to play it again. Perhaps the problem is, like you're saying, that we have too many long games that don't have sustained quality?

 

[JoshGod]

snip
Oh yes. I've seen a person that said he really couldn't stand the first movie say that he loved the second. I plan to take a friend to it this weekend as an X-mas gift and intend to do so in 3D for the main reason of seeing Smaug in 3D because he is terrifying.

But the movie itself I think is very good, and I've enjoyed the extensions they've done to parts of the story. I think you should at least give it a good thought over whether you should see it.

Back on topic as well though, you are right to an extent, but then there are games like the Dark Cloud games, which I adore, but can't seem to bring myself to finish again because they're too damn long. But you are right, if you love a game then you want to play it again. Perhaps the problem is, like you're saying, that we have too many long games that don't have sustained quality?

O well, I suppose who can turn down Ian McKellen.
Sustained quality is definitely what matters, as having high quality moments interfiled with bad ones is painful when you think imagine if only they had spent more time making another great bit instead of all these naff bits. There's a saying that I've forgotten the origin that roughly goes art is not attained when you cannot add any more, but when you cant remove any more. Or the alternative would you rather have a large turd filled sandwich or a small one with high quality ingredients.

 

[The Enquirer]

I have 14 games on my steam list and I play them all regularly.

Take that!


Cheap games are only a "problem" on PC. Ask a console player the same question. : D

Is it because console games are 60 dollars and they can only afford a few for months to avoid declaring bankrupcy?

OT: Yes, Believe it or not I bought Xcom as soon as it went on sale, installed it and haven't touched it yet. Depressing isn't it?