Why are there people with so many games that play almost none of them?

Lengthy deep thoughts follow... ;oP

I've only got a few hundred games on Steam and a few hundred on GOG.com, various amounts elsewhere and I think I've probably installed about 150-200 of them over time. Most games that I install are to do a demo test-run of the game to see the engine and get a general feel for what type of game it is and how fun it might be, with my intention not being to play it but to test it in order to gauge when I might add it to the short list to actually play. Some other games I install because I want to dig into them right away.

Right now is the best time in history to be a PC gamer though with more games available than ever before, including old dead games that vanished for years/decades being brought back from the dead, and games are cheaper now than ever due to ease of distribution with low overhead (almost non-existent) and a crowded marketplace competing for everyone's hard earned and finite dollars. Naturally due to supply and demand, the prices on a lot of games have to drop to be sustainable and so that's what ends up happening. As prices drop so significantly where it is very common for even newish games to be discounted to $5 or less within a year of release or so, they are more or less the price of a cup of coffee and people are more willing to accumulate games that look/sound interesting/cool for that cup of coffee, and to do it more often because hey, it's just peanuts we're talking about here.

It's often exciting to see such wide range of games at such rock bottom prices/discounts/bundles and I think our whimsical nature kicks in below a sweet spot in price to grab and hoard some games "for the future", but there are just so many shiny games out there that fit the bill like that, that we end up accumulating a huge backlog of games which we mostly intend to play "some day", but the hours of gameplay afforded by each game times the number of games make it probably unlikely we'll ever end up living long enough to play half of them LOL.

It's nice to know that you've got some cool fun games sitting there already for when you're ready to try them and that you got them for extremely low cost that is so low you can more or less not even care about it - and in many cases free from giveaways, freebie promos and similar. I stopped buying games in 2006 and started buying again in 2012 and ever since. Since 2012 I've accumulated about 500-600 games on GOG, Steam, Desura, ShinyLoot, GMG, GamersGate, various bundle sites and also won tonnes of games in giveaways/contests/promos. The most expensive game out of all of that so far was ArmA II for $8.49 or so, and Torchlight 2 for $6.49. Virtually every other game I have acquired during this entire time has been $4 or less, most of them $2.50 or less and if I were to figure out the average price per game I think it works out to about $1.60 or so (I did that a while back and that's what I ended up calculating). Quite literally peanuts.

So my entire collection of 600-800 games or whatever it is (no idea there are so many...) cost me probably around $1000-1200 max even though steamgifts.com or steamcompanion would show the value of the collection at retail prices of $3000+, I paid only a small fraction of that. If you look at brand new AAA game prices being $50-80 or so, my entire collection is only the cost of maybe 10-20 triple-A games and lots of people only buy brand new AAA games full price when they come out for $60 or so and end up with 10-20 games to show for. Me on the other hand have spent the same amount of money in the same timeframe per se, but have 600+ games to show for. Gives me a huge amount more choice when I'm bored to go seek a new game to toy with off the shelf. The way I look at it is that if I play 1/10th or even 1/20th of the games I've accumulated, I've gotten more than my money's share in entertainment value for the money spent.

I imagine it's the same with a lot of people including those with many times more games than I, although I also admit it is very funny/strange seeing people with thousands of dollars worth of games who have like 2000+ hours playing the free DOTA2, 1000+ hours of the free TF2, then their 3rd most played game is one they bought with 20 hours, and it trickles down from there. Definitely strange! :)

In another 10 years, game companies will just give all their games away for free and pay us to play them... :)

Have fun gaming everyone, it's the best time to be a gamer ever! :)

It is a truism, the more games you have in your Steam Account the less you have to play. I can never find anything good to play, there is too much crap.

You get to a point when you have too many games and you don't know what to play so you just don't play.

The more games I buy now, the less I'll have to spend during summer/winter sale. So in a way I'm saving a lot of money.

I ended up finally getting Skyrim and being horribly addicted to it for a month and a half. Finally took a bit of a break from it for now but will be back into it to finish it off soon. Before that I was addicted to Mount & Blade for 6 weeks or so. Once I complete Skyrim I think I'll fire up some games I previously started over time but never completed and finish them off before getting anything new going. Definitely have a lot of options to choose from for entertainment though. I think that's the most important thing in all this, is that the whole point of video games is to be entertained rather than feel like you have a list of 1000 unfinished goals you must complete to feel accomplishment or whatever. As long as you're enjoying the actual time you're spending on whatever game(s), that's what matters in the end even if you have a zillion games that never get installed.

Also keep in mind steam didn't always track playtime, i have a ton of games i played the hell out of years ago that show no time played. All the Half Life games are a great example, there are also games i played after they started tracking time but the time tracker was bugged for a while where it would often forget time played, even now the time tracker doesn't always work properly, i have a bunch of games where i know for a fact i played the hell out of but steam only shows 1 or 2 hours on it.

There are also games that i played the hell out of the retail version and found out the retail keys could be added to steam, good example of this was Unreal Tournament 3. Then other games i own the retail version of but rebought it during a sale to have it on my steam list for whenever i want to replay it so i don't have to track down the disk for it. There are also games that were remade that came with the original as a separate entry, and games that list their expansions as separate entries despite the fact that you still need to launch the base game for it. Also games i got in a bundle because it was cheaper to buy the bundle than it was to buy just the game i wanted, or was only a buck or two more so i figured why not in case i decide to play the others.