u/vladimir_dev

I'll try to make this not too long, but no promises :)

I wanted to write down how I approach my backlog, and if someone finds some of it useful - all the better.

First of all, some background facts that are relevant in forming my approach:

• I've been gaming for a long time, even before online stores were a thing. So sometimes it gets a bit unclear what games from those old times should be on the list of "my games"
• When I did discover Steam and other platforms later, I started buying all kinds of stuff left and right, usually because of some big discounts, or bundles that would have one or two games I wanna play and a bunch of ones I don't really care about. So my library ended up having a lot of "junk" like that.
• Almost all of that junk got catalogued when I was making a list to keep track of my games, before I started caring about how many I would actually play...
• I have a full time job and a small child so my time has become very limited and unpredictable. Also I like RPGs that can be really long. That's why my numbers might seem "small" to some people
• I'm primarily a single-player, story kind of guy and I consider a game "finished" when I reach the end of the story (see the "end credits"). How much I do before that doesn't really matter.

So here's some of my imporant tips or rules I set for myself to help me navigate all this:

• Don't be ashamed to play on easy mode and/or look up hints or walkthroughs. Not all games are going to turn out as well as you imagined even if you did research them (which I didn't do much in the beginning) so it's ok to use help to get over a hurdle.
• You can use HLTB to figure out where you are in the game, as well as helping you choose what to play next, as well as tracking. When I discovered this it helped a lot. Year 2024 was when I did a big push to finish some short games and finish some I've started earlier and never finished... Some of them I figured out that I was actually close to the end thanks to HLTB, so they just needed one more push :)
• Stop buying games as much as possible and do a lot more research for the ones that look really appealing. Avoid bundles and sales just because something is cheap. There will always be the next sale. Focus on quality.
• Curate the libraries and clear out the junk. Somewhere between 2022 and 2024 I started caring more about my backlog and the percentage of finished games, and I discovered a great feature - both Steam and HLTB have the option to completely remove a game from your account as if it was never there. So I cleared a lot of the "junk" I mentioned in the beginning and started focusing on getting only games that really deserve it (my complete library count was 340 in 2021 and now it's 350).
• "Swap" when you want to buy something, instead of adding to the list. This is my latest idea and might be the most contraversial, but it works for me. It is related to the previous point. No matter how much "junk" I cleaned, there's always more that could be removed - whether it's "junk", old games that don't work as well nowadays, or just something I've lost interest in over time. So what I do now is, when I do buy something, I delete a "junk" one, and keep my total library at 350 games. Some may call it "cheating", but for me it's a win-win - a) I'm making my library more curated and cleaner, b) I feel less guilty about buying stuff, especially since I only focus on the ones that are really worth it, c) I'm increasing the chance of finishing more of my backlog, because this way the library will have more of the games that I actually care about playing, and d) my percentages are less skewed since the total doesn't change.

I've only bought maybe 3-4 games out of the most recent ones (like Baldur's Gate 3 for example) over the past couple of years. There are a couple of new or upcoming games I'm interested in, but I might need a PC upgrade for them, and with the RAM prices where they are right now, looks like that'll wait for at least a couple more years. So it seems I'm done buying for quite a while.

My completions by year

My most played games (since I started using Steam)

My library breakdown by category

EDIT: my HLTB profile is here if anyone's interested: https://howlongtobeat.com/user/VladTheRad

I'm proud to announce I've finally reached 50% of all my games finished :)

(175/350)

https://x.com/VladSoRad/status/2073800017400185002

I'll post more details and my approach later so that this post isn't miles long