ydal

If you’re a bit of a gamer and have a bit of loose change, you’ll pro­bably have the ten­dency to acquire Steam games during sales.

This will inva­ria­bly lead to you having a pretty big Steam game port­fo­lio over time. Accor­ding to steamcalculator.com, my account is worth about 2000 USD right now. That’s the cur­rent pri­ces for the games, which is way more than what I put into the games — after all, I bought most of them during sale actions.

On the other hand, I’ve also put quite a few hours of my time into Steam games, and even with mini­mum wage I’d pro­bably get a couple thousand more. Hell, I’ve played Fall­out: New Vegas for “only” 70 hours, and that’s actually not pretty much.

The thing is that you’ll inva­ria­bly build up a back­log. Even with the mixed «bles­sing» of rather short sin­gle player por­ti­ons of games these days, you’ll have a hell of a time catching up with each game that you bought, espe­cially if you want to milk them for their money’s worth.

Which is pretty inte­res­ting, since in the end, you could spend up spen­ding more money for the fun of having variety than the pro­fes­sed goal of get­ting the most worth out of sin­gle games.

And what actually hap­pens is that you’ll pro­bably end up not play­ing some games at all.

There’s a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons for it. For example, you might just not have the time to actually play a game. More com­monly, though, you will pro­bably not have time to pur­sue a game. You might play it for a bit, but then you’ll start ine­vi­ta­bly filing it under “have to play this more during downtime”.

Except you’ll never use that down­time for that game, since there’s pro­bably some­thing else that actually tick­les your cur­rent fancy. Often enough, there’s no real chance to get bored “enough” for you to go back to your gaming back­log except if you make a con­scious effort.

So the back­log grows, and grows, and grows.

In my case, there’s still some Hum­ble Bundle games that are lying around, which isn’t that much of a loss since I mainly bought it for the other games.

But then, there’s quite a lot more: The King’s Bounty series, pro­bably about at least 100 hours of gaming. Cthulhu saves the world, a char­ming little adven­ture. The Pen­um­bra and Amne­sia games, sup­po­sedly very great. The very cute Braid. Darksi­ders. Ano­maly: War­zone Earth. Atom Zom­bie Smas­her. Fro­zen Syn­apse. Far Cry 2. Machi­na­rium. Magi­cka. Indigo Pro­phecy. Osmos. Nation Red. Recet­tear. Saira. Space­Chem. Trine.

All very good games and I don’t feel bad for having bought them. (As oppo­sed to Dead Rising 2. Blech.)

There’s just no way I’ll have the kind of casual down­time that allows me to click off with one of these for half an hour. I’d rather hit up Bor­der­lands and finish up some DLC, for example.

Thus, in con­clu­sion, I have to liken this to some­thing inter­net nerds ever­y­where have a cer­tain con­nec­tion with. There’s other things which you some­ti­mes really need to get around to, but never seem to be able to finish.

Two dre­a­ded words: “inbox zero”.

That time when you actually manage to have zero unread mails — or rather, zero mails that still need your atten­tion, if you don’t use read state to indi­cate that.

Using that nomen­cla­ture, it seems I’ll never be able to one day post a sta­tus update con­tai­ning the sim­ple words “Steam zero”.

If you're a bit of a gamer and have a bit of loose change, you'll probably have the tendency to acquire Steam games during sales. This will invariably lead to you having a pretty big Steam game portfolio over time. According to steamcalculator.com, my account is worth about 2000 USD right now. That's the current ...