Will you ever get back to playing your backlog games and clear them off your list?

Hello, you all. It is a mission but I'm down to work on my list. Continuing to buy DLC for a game I stop playing over a year ago is what made me buy fewer games and spend more time playing games I have for the remainder year and the next if needed. From now on I will buy games either on sale or not to prevent this from happening again. I know a lot of you have a backlog of games and would like to hear your way of handling your situation.

Some of them? Maybe. All of them? I don’t know what would need to happen for that to occur. Either every upcoming game I’m interested in should get pushed forwards by 3-4 years or I would need to end up in a situation where I just can’t buy anything new for several years and need to settle for what I have.

Most games also don’t hold my interest as well as they used to. So even if there is a dry season with new releases (like how it currently kinda is), I don’t necessarily feel like hopping back to playing something that’s several years old. I did finally get around to playing The Foundation DLC for Control though and probably will finish AWE this week as well, so that’s something.

TLDR: Don’t really have a plan. Maybe if I won the lottery, so I could leave my job and have all the free time I could possibly need to play games?

I dont even play the games I want to play, nevermind the ones that have built on my backlog for the last 10 years.

And I'm unemployed with infinite free time, too

I do sometimes but it really depends on the game and if I'm in the right mindset for it. I remember I played Doom 2016 in 2017/18. When I'm on a mission to play something I own already, I usually will just pick something and give it at least an hour of my time. If it's grabs me then I pick it up later.

For some games that won't work (long RPGs) so I only start those if I'm really into the premise of the game.

I have been trying to get better at this last year and this year. I have cross a decent amount off and have been trying to first do the games I purchased first rather than a PS plus or a free game. Though its hard because this year there have been 2 PS plus games i really wanted to play Control and FF7 Remake so it stalls everything. Plus I have a bad habit of buy games as well which I really am trying not to do as much but every once in a while something will catch my attention. The other issue is me getting excited to play a backlog game, where after I complete one, I don't often feel like moving to the next right a way because it can feel like a chore so that is usually when I play something else until I get the desire to play the backlog.

It's been my 2021 so far, i used to throw a backlog game in for every 2 or 3 new games i'd play, but there are far less new games i'm wanting to play these days and i'm currently way into PS2 era games.
Just finished Conflict: Desert Storm, now i'm playing Project Eden on PC which i am completely enamored by, i do have Gears 5 installed... but i kinda want to play Homeworld instead...

I tend to watch a load of random UPFs or other shows on here and I usually spot a game that I have in my library but haven't played that makes me want to give it a go. Otherwise my really boring answer is I have my Steam library organised by tags, as I usually have a genre/style/theme of what I want to play and that'll lead me to picking out something.

I don't think this is a real user but...

I do play a lot of my backlog and am pretty good about that but my problem is buying games. I buy too many games, to the point that I think I have an addiction.

More recently tho I haven't been doing good w/ my backlog because of Game Pass/PS Now as I've been focused on those services to get my money's worth.

Nope. I could stop buying new games entirely and still probably have enough to last me the rest of my life. I'm like a cold war nuclear powered nation that could destroy all life on earth three times over, but keeps building more nukes anyway.

I'm never going to finish all of them, but I do get back to a lot of my backlog from time to time. Just last week I got back into Transformers: Devastation.

My backlog is obscene. I don't think it is humanly possible to finish the number of games in there. Now, some of those are free games that I never intend to start in the first place, but even if I throw those aside, it's still probably a pretty long list.

I was lucky enough to clear most of my backlog in the last year, i am actually struggling to find new games to play. I only have Catherine and finally finishing off Doom Eternal.

I've been tackling Dark Souls again, and finally I'm further than I've ever been in the past. Progress!

I actually started doing this in the second half of last year when it was clear the pandemic wasn't going away over night. I have actually cleared off A LOT of games, especially releases from the second half of 2017 to 2019 when I really wasn't that into gaming outside of the occasional multiplayer match of a PC shooter. Since October of last year I have finished:

1. Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag
2. Resident Evil 2 Remake
3. Call of the Sea
4. Dishonored 2 - Emily
5. Ghost of Tsushima
6. Assassin's Creed Syndicate
7. Astro's Playroom
8. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
9. Ori And The Will Of The Wisps
10. The Last of Us Part II
11. Assassin's Creed Odyssey
12. Tetris Effect - Journey Mode
13. Outer Wilds
14. Return of the Obra Dinn
15. Gears 5
16. Control
17. Shadow Complex Remastered
18. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
19. Hitman 2

From the list I made at the start of this project, I have remaining:

• Red Dead Redemption 2 (in the epilogue so almost done)
• Disco Elysium (halfway through)
• Dead Cells (I can make it to the final boss every time just need to get over the hump)
• Yakuza 0
• God of War 2018

After that I have Spiderman: Miles Morales, Demons' Souls Remastered, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla left over from last year.

From there, I have two kind of specialized backlogs for two genres I really enjoy but have not played enough: 2D metroidvanias and PC "CRPGs".

For metroidvanias:

• Hollow Knight (I got deep into it on Switch when it launched but fell off and am going to start over on console)
• Blasphemous
• Guacamelee 1 and 2
• Steamworld Dig 2
• Axiom Verge
• Yoku's Island Express

and for PC RPGs:

• Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition
• Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition
• Fallout: New Vegas (with a lot of mods)
• Dragon Age Inquisition
• Pillars of Eternity
• Divinity Original Sin 2

I figure with this year being a bit light on new releases, I will sprinkle in games from those two lists between what does actually make it out for the rest of the year. I actually feel good I made so much progress recently and have a plan going forward, although it sucks the pandemic was what motivated me.

Occasionally I will, but inevitably, whenever I try a game I've had in my backlog for any decent amount of time, I realize there was a reason I didn't play it at the time. For instance, I just rebought Horizon on PC and am about 3 hours in so far. I can already feel myself getting fatigued by the rote open world design that put me off of it the first time I played it on the PS4. That's typically how it goes for me. I get excited by the thought of delving into a new game, but end up being largely disappointed and dropping it after a couple of hours. I'm trying to learn guitar and web development right now, plus I like to draw and sculpt, and I like to read and watch TV/movies, so there is only so much time I can give to games. When I do play them, I need to be immediately hooked by something, either the world design, gameplay, or plot. If none of those catches me in a couple of hours, I'll bounce off of it. That usually means I just fall back to familiar games that I enjoy.

Much like books, if I find I don't enjoy a game in my backlog I "shelve" it forever. I made a big dent in mine last year, even got a platinum trophy on some, but I definitely didn't force myself to play something that wasn't fun.

I've actually been making a ton of progress on this after making a couple changes in my playing habits:

I use SteamCompletionist.net to keep a queue going of the next 10 games I intend to play. It also automatically flags games in your library as Played or Unplayed, and you can set manual flags for Beaten (or Blacklist, if it's not a game that can really be beaten).

I've also started using GB's list feature to start a very basic game journal. I note what game I play, what date I started it, and what date I finished it. I also note if I placed something on hold with an intent to finish it later. This has made a really big difference in the number of games I actually finish. I started halfway through 2019, and I finished 33 games that year. In 2020, I finished 61 games, and I've finished 25 games so far this year.

https://www.giantbomb.com/profile/nophilip/lists/games-i-finished-in-2021/370151/

I've been making my way through my backlog with this strategy - bite the bullet and give a game an honest attempt, so that you are well past the tutorial and have a pretty good idea of what the game is, and then maybe around the five hour mark decide if you want to finish it or not. If you're not going to, then wipe that off your backlog forever and feel free to watch the ending on Youtube if you want to see the ending. You don't have to finish every game you start.

It's definitely easy to spend too much on games. When I bought the PS4 a few years ago, I probably spent around 400 Euros on games immediately. I couldn't decide which game I wanted to play first so I bought basically all the ones I was interested in. Many of those games I still haven't touched, and they have since gone for much cheaper, and on some cases for free on PS+.

One does not simply complete a backlog of over 400* games.

*Steam's fuzzy math along with Origin, Uplay, EGS and five consoles.

I will never complete my backlog because that's ridiculous. There are games on there that I don't want to play anymore (and I've even played some of THOSE) and games that I didn't choose (through PlayStation Plus, or Humble Subscription or whatever) so it wouldn't even be enjoyable.

Instead I view my backlog as a library. I will continue to select titles from it from time to time and play them but just because I bought some crappy Vita game because it was on sale for 50 cents and I figured "why not" does not mean I feel compelled to play it. I played Need For Speed The Run, Homefront, and up to the last boss of Inversion last year and my main take away from that experience was that I need to spend less time with crappy games I don't actually like.

Playing games you don't want to play just because they're on your backlog is the sunk cost fallacy. You don't actually get anything from clearing your backlog. That doesn't mean you should always be buying new stuff or whatever, or that you shouldn't play older games (I play more older games than most people) but just that playing games is not an obligation even if you at one point spent money on the game. If you forget that you end up playing Homefront, and trust me, nobody wants that.

I don't keep a backlog. If I don't get to a game then it's fine.

I might someday be sitting around and think oh hey I'd like to play this or that but I'm not going to maintain some list of things that I need to make sure I revist.

Unlikely I'll ever finish it but I've done a better job recently of organizing my backlog into 3 categories.

Category 1 - Games I'm willing to pay full price for. These games will be prioritized first if I have one in my bullpen

Category 2 - Games I'll buy if on sale.

Category 3 - Games I'll give a shot if becomes available on PS+. If it doesnt grab me early-ish, it gets removed from the backlog.

No. If I fall off a game, there's a reason for it. I stopped stressing about my backlog.

There's never been a better time to be a videogamer with a backlog. Since this Pandemic started I finished off Dark Souls 3. Moved onto Dragon Quest 8 for my PS2 which I set up on the kitchen tv and completed it starting from a save game from 11 years ago. Having finished that I put on Devil May Cry 3 onto the PS2 which will be completed in the coming weeks. I don't mind if they dont release another full game this year as TitanFall 2 is still in its shrink wrap and I have Doom Eternal and DMC Definitive edition to play.

Backlogs are so 2019

Finish? Probably not.

Play? Yes.

Been trying to take weekends and give me a day to just enjoy older games I've been meaning to play. It's hard not to dive straight into a JRPG I want to get through but starting off slow so I don't overwhelm myself with 80 hours of game.

Who knows honestly. I have this same exact problem with anime. I tend to try and play things these days that are less than 30 hours as it will take me a month or 2 to finish as it is.

I've never had much of a backlog. There are games I got from PS+ for no other reason than they were offered but I never seriously considered downloading them. There are games like Watch Dogs 1 and 2 that I gave honest shots and just fell off of, no sense wasting my time with them.

Really all I can think of that I look at and go, I really should just finish that even if it's with a guide, Broken Age chief among them with The Witness a close second. Then there's the GTA Trilogy I bought back in the day just to have them around if I ever wanted nostalgia, but after playing most of the first island of GTA3 I realized sometimes you really can't go home again (even if the fake radio and the cars are still pretty awesome).

I came to a sort of realization about the backlog concept years ago: I don't care.

There are so many games in my digital libraries I do not care at all about, acquired through humble bundles, PS+, etc. There is no benefit to trying to force myself to play games I don't want to play just because I technically own them. I finish probably over 90% of the games I play, but I do not play a game unless I actually want to.

Feeling guilty for re-playing a game I love for the 5th time or pumping hundreds or thousands of hours into my staple games just because I *could* be playing something I've never played that's in my steam library just doesn't make any sense.

Don't get me wrong, there are games in my libraries that I would like to get to some day, and I will, but the whole concept of a backlog that I have some sort of obligation to chip away at is not something that I adhere to.

I play what I want to play when I want to play it.

I'm kind of doing it right now actually. I don't have a massive backlog because at this point I just accept that there's plenty of celebrated games I won't have time to play but I been getting through my PS+ games lately.

Control, FF7R, Shadow or the Tomb Raider, and now I'm going through Middle-Earth: Shadow or War. After that I'll finally play Metal Gear Solid 5 and the first of the new Hitman trilogy. After that I think I'll be done with what I have downloaded from PS+ games I wanted to play in the last couple years that I never got to.

Since last August when I got a Switch I started through those titles and I have plenty more I want to buy. There are 1/2 dozen games in my PS library that aren't downloaded that I think I'm never going to get to and another dozen through PS+ that I don't actually care about at all. A mix of a few AAA's and indie's. Once I'm done with the PS games I'm playing through I'm going to have fun trying out the next Nintendo game I'm interested in. I never got into buying games en masse on Steam, where I have a library of 80 or so games that are largely older titles. I've played many of them but it's been years since I've gotten excited about adding a bunch of stuff I'll never get to anyway.

I feel good about where I'm at. SOFTR was middling but otherwise I haven't spent a lot of time on a game just because I've felt a completionist obligation for several years. I feel a little guilty that most of the games I play are AAA. Every awards season there are a dozen or so small games that knock people's socks off that I feel like I should play. Several of those are the mentally demanding and reflex-taxing ones that I'm too lazy to beat my head against.

I tend to spend lesser money than I may otherwise on games by playing a lot of the stuff I get through PS+ and although I'm buying Switch games (physical ones even!) I don't spend more money than time on video games. Listening to Giantbomb's podcasts every week keeps me in the loop about different games in general which in a weird way keep me from feeling like I'm missing out.

A good technique I used to employ when i wanted to make a dent in my backlog was that i was only allowed to purchase a new game upon completing two games. While i could theoretically pick short games to complete just to hit the goal, it still cleared out some games on my shelf that sat for years.

Now if you arent someone who needs to see credits you can use the same method but just change the end goal. Instead of beat a game it could be "put x number of hours in" whatever will make you feel like you put time in.

i finally beat Battle Chef Brigade the other day after having started it 2 years ago and putting it down after a few mins cause i wasn't in the mood so ... maybe? i've been trying to buy less ( no real money atm anyway) and finish more stuff lately and in general the past couple years. a group i'm in does a year/monthly gaming thread where we try n finish games and usually have a monthly challenge of some form and i've found it to really help with my completing what i start. its not perfect and theres plenty i know i'll just never bother with finishing but i'd like to think the majority of the ones i care about will eventually dissipate.

also the running list i have with dates started/finished in order of what i start them that i made in a google docs spreadsheet vs just my notepad txt file of completed games really helped put things into perspective.

...and i at times try and look on HLTB and shoot for whatever of the games i'm thinking of is the least time consuming .. that helps get shorter games off the list

Over the last year I've eliminated the idea of a backlog. I have finally stopped myself from buying games just because they are on a good discount because chances are I will never play them. I now have 3 or 4 games I am playing at any one time that I will bounce between depending on the mood but I wont buy another one until I'm done with one. Doesn't matter if there is a great discount because chances are it'll be on sale again sometime in the future.

In many ways the small hard drive in the PS5 has helped massively with this. I literally don't have the space for any extra games so I can't possible buy one until I am done with something else (well I suppose I technically could buy one and not download it but that's too far even for me when I was buying loads of games).

It's been tough and I'm sure not a mentality everyone can have but overall it's improved my enjoyment of games. I was at a point where playing sometimes felt like work as I convinced myself I had to get through a game to move onto something else to prevent my backlog from getting bigger.

Side bonus: I'm also spending far less money on games overall. No wasted money on things I'll never play and most of the games I do buy are not at release so I pick up at a discount