Between PlayStation Plus, Microsoft Game Pass, and the hole in your heart where the ability to love used to be, it’s easy to build up a huge backlog games. Games often take hundreds of hours to beat - heck, even ‘shorter’ games tend to run the full length of a television season. So it’s only natural that, during a Steam sale, you buy twenty JRPGs that move with the speed of frozen molasses.
Having a backlog of games can feel like a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you’ve got all those games! Remember as a kid when you thought, “One day I’ll spend my money on as many games as I want”? Well, good news: that day is today! You’re already doing it!
On the other hand, by now you’ve learned that life is meaningless and kindness is only a transaction. Having thousands of games across decades of console generations isn’t always the key to good times you want to believe when buying entertainment in bulk.
Rather, game backlogs can often feel like homework: Do you take on the triple-A adventure game everyone’s talking about now or the indie game about depressed plants visiting a burn ward? The fighting game with beloved pop culture characters or a game called Sex With Hitler? That last game literally exists, folks. And no, I haven’t played it, so if it’s subversive in a cool way or something, hurrah hurrah.
But what if there were a way to clear out your backlog? What if you could play as Garfield in a fighting game and have sex with Hitler? You’d feel great! Briefly. Until you realize that the only thing you had going for you was complaining about your backlog. Without that backlog, you won’t have an excuse to avoid playing remakes of The Last of Us that seem to be released on the same yearly schedule as Madden.
That’s why I’ve created this helpful list of tips on how to never overcome your gaming backlog.
5. Buy Gaming Bundles Whether You Want Those Games Or Not
Bundles might be the most efficient way to spend money on games to add to your backlog. For the price of one or two games you’ll never play, you can get many games you’ll never play!
You might not a fan of Europa Universalis - heck, you might not like grand strategy games at all! - but there’s no reason you can’t spend $30 to own all the games and downloadable content in the series. Watch in wonder as you enter each of the twenty Steam codes, download the game, and then delete it four months from now when you need the space.
On the bright side, a lot of bundles go towards important causes and charities, so at least you’re helping others while destroying yourself.
4. Literally Count Every Game You Have By Hand
Yes, most consoles and gaming shops can tell you how many games are in your collection. But one game is a tragedy; a million games is a statistic. Seeing the sheer number of games you have won’t hit you until you count each individual one by hand.
That’s right, open your bin of Super Nintendo games you’ll eventually get around to playing despite having the entire SNES library on an emulator that fits in your pocket. Count each of those games. Even the joke ones. Count ‘em all. Write down their names.
Scroll through your Steam library. Count one-by-one. Each re-release and remake counts as its own game because you haven’t finished either.
Want to feel even worse? Count every game that’s in a collection. If you haven’t beaten any of the games in Sonic Origins before, you’ve got four more games on the roster.
Each time your backlog number goes up, remember that you once genuinely thought there was a chance you were going to play Gran Turismo 7. Think about how that game, which could take hundreds of hours to complete, is just one single entry in your archive of pain.
Look at the number. Look at how long it took you to just figure out how many games you have. Then take a look in the mirror and see what you really are.
3. Find Out The Average Length Of Every Game In Your Backlog
Now that you’ve got a list of every game in your backlog, go to a website like How Long To Beat and find out the length of time it would take to complete them all. Not even 100 percent it. Just to beat. You’re not going to 100 percent Final Fantasy 15. Stop it.
Of course, a lot of smaller indie games won’t be in some databases. Let’s be generous and say that each one of them has about five hours of content. Some are shorter, some are longer, but if you can’t find the average length of a game, that’s a fair little placeholder.
If it’s an MMO, that’s harder to define, so let’s just say 80 hours. You’ll probably need more to get the full experience, but that’s a conservative estimate. By 80 hours in, you’ll know if you want to quit or not. That’s about 80 episodes of Law & Order: SVU, but who’s counting.
Great.
You know how long - on average - each of your games is. Now go add it all up. All of it. Every length of every game.
Look at that number.
That’s not how long you have played your games. That’s how long you’ve got left until you finish playing your games.
2. Think About Whether It’s Worth It To Even Try
Do you have a family? A job? Maybe looking for a family and a job? Those take up time. Have you ever consumed food? That takes up time. Walked outside on a bright day to feel the sun on your back and the pleasure of just existing? Huge time suck.
If you’re going to overcome this backlog, you need to focus up. Even if you’ve only got dozens of games in your backlog like a meek child, that’s still hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work you’ve got ahead of you.
And make no mistake: it will be work. Every side quest will feel like doing chores on an infinite to-do list. The good news is the ten games on your list focused on physical labor are supposed to feel like chores. So that’s good.
Each RPG will use up weeks of your time - and you own a lot. Every strategy game will have a tutorial longer than you want to be on this Earth. When the world map on a platformer appears, you’ll recognize that there’s no escape.
Is it worth it? Is it worth it to play these games? You’ve been putting off Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for six years now. Is today the day you finally jump in? Probably not. You probably won’t even think about it again until you pass by its greyed-out entry on your Steam list.
Why did you buy all these games? Just to get a moment’s respite from the horrors of the world?
1. Buy More Games To Get A Moment’s Respite From The Horrors Of The World
Life is hard but the Steam Fall sale is probably around the corner. You definitely shouldn’t start any big games on your list until you see if you want to start a different big game you don’t own yet.