Organising your Library

By genre, and I have a few extra tags for: backlog, completed, unfinished, and "multiplayer or bust" (like Left 4 Dead, Magicka, or DST). If I don't care about the game at all it goes to the hidden pile.

I have several categories.

Favourites - not a tag itself, but I mark all games I really love launching every once in a while here, so I have easy access to them and always something to grab when I want to have fun and not necessarily trying something new.

Backlog - everything I consider "good enough to try soon", my upper limit for this category is that it should NEVER take more than a single screen of titles, but in practice it's usually 10-20 titles I plan playing really soon, very often several titles are installed and being played right now.

Backlog / Dropped - everything that was in backlog, but I decided to drop due to being boring, buggy, not entertaining or in some other way uninteresting. Eventually I plan to go back to those titles, but it's entirely undefined when that happens, and if at all, this is potentially a category to evaluate when my backlog one runs close to 0 (if it ever happens that is...).

Backlog / Finished - everything that was in backlog, that I consider "finished", either because of completing entire story, all achievements, or playing "long enough" to not consider it dropped. Good titles worth returning from that category will automatically be favourite, everything else will just be finished with no intention of launching it again, e.g. because story was very linear and there is not enough fun to replay the game in near future.

It works really good, I mainly focus on two first categories, while two last ones are "archive". Everything else is uncategorized and I'm not even trying to change it in any way, since it's pointless. When I see a game that I want to play at some point, I either add it to backlog if I own it already, or wishlist it otherwise (and add to backlog immediately after getting).

It's definitely not the best way to organize things, but it's really good and I'm sure that many people with uncategorized libraries might want to try this or very similar approach, if they're not doing it yet.

I inspired my categories on how MAL works, don't ask, I just felt it worked nicely and I can't be asked to change it now. So I have:

• Started
• Started (endless)
• Dropped
• Stuck
• Finished
• Plan to play soon
• F2P
• Prototypes
• Software

Everything else (a couple thousand games) is in the uncategorized section. I may add a "On hold/paused" category at some point but I think that might cause me to never declare some games as dropped even after is clear I won't play them anymore.

In theory mine are organized by play status, but my "things to play" list has split into 11 different parts.

My categories are:

• Favorites
• Finished
• Free to Play

I sorted mine primarily by genre. In addition, I have my favorites which are some of my go to games and below that I have my multiplayer games and then a serious backlog category for games I want to get to next. I did filter out most of the crappy gleam games into a trash category, though I suppose I could have just hidden them. Took me a couple weeks, but I wanted to keep what little sanity I had left.

That was a tasty potato!

Hoover Style - only me understands the logic behind my library... :3

I have a category for 100%'d, near-100%'d games, priority games to play next, SG wins, games with uncollected trading cards, and games with local multiplayer
recently added a category for games that I started playing but didn't finish yet, haven't added all games that belong to that category yet

Bump!

By interest... kinda. I used to categorize by "Downloaded" and not, but then my HDD died, and I never cleaned up... now I have a handful of categories which barely make sense but I still have the "Installed games" category where I keep everything installed. Other than that I just use the favorites.

I'm lazy.

I organize largely by genre, and I don't mind if games are in more than one category, but I don't go by the Steam tags; I categorize each game based on my own impression of its gameplay. Besides the genres, I also have categories for the games I'm currently playing, games I've finished (separated into will/might/will not play again), games I'm stalled on and may or may not ever finish, and games I hated, quit, and will never touch again.

And I only categorize each game after my first gameplay session, so that makes it more manageable than trying to do it all at once. So I've got my huge list of categories (32 and growing!), and then a list of unsorted games that I haven't gotten around to yet. I thought about making categories specifically for "games I really want to play", "games I kind of want to play", and "WTF how did I even get this game", but seeing the chaos of my backlog provides motivation to not just replay my favorites over and over. XD

By... favorite / last played...

Mine is by interest, with a twist - I only categorize them after I've played them for a little while. There's favorites, for the 247 games that I'm going to finish for sure. There's mediocre, for the 691 games that I'm willing to go back to if I'm in the right mood for them or something. There's ignore, for the 1763 games that I'm never going to touch again. There's unplayable, for the 10 games I have that don't work for various reasons. And then there's beaten, for the 155 games that I managed to finish completely along the way.

And yes, you read those numbers right. I've played (or attempted to, in the case of those ten) 2866 games.

EDIT: Just a couple hours after posting this, i found an 11th unplayable game. Can't get to the menus, the game wants to "update game data" with a server that no longer exists. RIP Relativity Wars.

I have tried different tags and different things to help, but when your game library is over 1500 or more they stop being efficient, also if you use multiple PCs some do not save them, and have the potential to wipe all those tags you built / organized them under.

Now I just use the drop down of Installed, Videos, or Favorites. =D

I sort games that I acquired in bundles according to where I acquired it from (Humble Bundle, etc.). If I bought the game, whether from Steam or another store, it just stays in the generic games category. I just like to know if I got a game in a bundle and which bundle. Now that you can set multiple categories, I've also set categories for local multi-player, games I've finished and games to play next.

By interest. A newly added game goes either to SG wins, top (wishlist, AAA, next to play) or favourites (the latter being a total mess xD). When I complete a game, it gets removed from the category and therefore ends up in the standard games category.

I organize my games mostly by interest, those that I'll play in a near future.

One categorie is for the multiplayer games, and an other one is for the games I know I have to do one day but I don't know when :p

The rest stay in the default game vault.

Bump!

My sorting is only ever half done, but my main sorting is whether or not my damn potato can run it, Runable, Somewhat Runable(aka just Goat Sim), Not Runable(Which sadly includes the Overlord games :( ) and I have Touching for a few games that really tugged my heartstrings

I just gave up on it.