My friend texted me and said,
On the surface this just seems like the regular lament of every gamer, the “song of our people.” Au contraire, mon ami! (My favorite BatB character is Lumiere, roll with it!)
Their Steam account was ACTUALLY created on September 29, 2025 and boasts a grand total of 15 games – hardly the costly and lamented backlog the rest of us are hauling around. This is more like a binge Costco trip – or, yanno, the creation of a Steam account shortly before Steam’s massive Black Friday sale. (Alongside a Steam Deck.)
So.
“…a collection of video games that a player intends to play but has not yet completed.”
Dude is it just me or is that entire sentence doing a shit-ton of lifting?
Intent to play: How active does this intent have to be? WHO IS MAKING SPREADSHEETS?! (Please, please – if you have a spreadsheet, can I see it? I’m just so fascinated.) Does intent only qualify if it’s literally on your to-do list, as nebulous as that may be? (Like folding laundry.) Are we just assuming intent because of purchase, because I can probably point to a handful of friends that buy because the game is on sale, not because they’re ever going to boot the game up.
Complete Games: Survival gamers, laugh with me on this, when are our games “complete”? Jokes aside, I wonder how folks define ‘completed’ – end of the game? End of interest in the game? End of time you had FUN in the game? End of base game outside of DLC? Never-ending because live service games are $ makers?
Let’s also look at organization.
When I look at my (over-organized) Steam library, I realize that I never really call it a backlog. Maybe sometimes in conversation? If/when I say “backlog”, I think of the word as the demarcation point between “played” and “have not played”. My “library” is the active thing I play and my “backlog” are the things that are unplayed.
But unplayed stretches all the way from “I should get back into that” to “I’ll try that one day, maybe” to “Not even if you fucking paid me.” (I know the knee-jerk response to the last one is probably “well why is it in your library, dumbass” – which is a good point, except I come across toooons of gamekeys, so possession is not necessarily a sign of my interest!)
So this brings me to the question: what’s actually in YOUR backlog? (Library? Backlog?) Is it games you’ll play, games you bought on sale and never opened, gifted keys that seem less than appealing? Is it games you’re keeping around as comfort objects?
(That would be me and Firewatch, probably.)
Do you feel guilt about it? Does the number stress you out, or does a tidy collection view make it manageable? Or maybe you hide them from view?? I can’t do that, personally, it bugs me when I feel like I can’t SEEEEE my entire collection for obsession observation.
So yea, lemme know!
(BTW – I know you wanna know what’s in the DEAD/TRASH file, and here ya go!)
Backlog Hehe just chatted about that this morning. Yeah, I honestly buy games so I can play them. Just because they end up in the “It’s been a minute since I gamed that,” does not mean I have abandoned them. Nein, I just get new “exciting” games and thus well…..yada…yada. But I am truly filled with horror at the thought of buying a game and just never touching it. No..no not me senor. I must judge it by looks feel and my 3rd eye blind. Haha and just because i have all those games listed above in the dead/abandoned going nowhere by devs should tell you something. Sifner has honestly improved my 3rd eye for buying these trash games. Now I wait impatiently while the games cook coz otherwise see dead trash again. That’s my two cents about the whole spiel.
Hahaha. I love when I open a store page and I’m like “Wow, this looks kinda like something that’s gonna be dropped in 3 months, wait who the fuck do I know that own…oh.”
I found this organizational article on Steam collections, looks like Dynamic Collections are pretty neat!