Last Week's Games: My Game Buying Analytics

This edition of the blog is going to take a decidedly Non-Gamey tone, since very little of it is to do with playing games. Most of it is the analytics I have been flagellating myself with all week. I will put some game bits in the start, but if you aren’t interested in anything I’ve got to say about my large and probably insurmountable game collection you can close the web page after the next paragraph.

I carried on with my usual games of The Horus Heresy: Legions and Rayman: Legends; games that I use mainly to pass time between jobs and things I need to be doing but are fun nonetheless, if better enjoyed in short bursts than extended gaming sessions! I also had a go with Chaos Gate, trying to beat one of the optional levels without losing any Space Marines. I didn’t get very far with that one. Finally, I continued playing Wolfenstein 3D and, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, managed to drive myself to beat it. The review will be coming up on Friday, but I will say as one last snide remark that, brutally difficult though that last level was obviously designed to be, if I hadn’t looked up the map on a guide and found that secret area, I’d never have got past the second room.

Something to aspire to?
Or an addiction-based problem?

Watching far too many YouTube videos has made me aware of a vast multitude of games that I want to at least try. I’ve always owned too many video games, but that fact has been kicked into overdrive once I discovered Steam and its Wishlist system. To explain, if you find a game you are interested in on the Store page you can add it to your Wishlist. At some point, a game will usually go on sale and you can get it for a significantly reduced price. When this happens to a game on your Wishlist, Steam will send you an email telling you so, tempting you to buy the game. Being able to buy a lot of games for a relatively small amount of money tugs at my addictive nature, and this is how I’ve ended up with several hundred of the things – many of which I have never played. The fact that I now have the option to do this on GOG does nothing to help this issue.

At some point last week, I decided to count my games. I already keep track of what games I own on an excel document, so it was simply a case of working it out from the numbers in the margin. Having counted them, I then decided to total how many of them I’ve played, how many of them I’ve beaten and how many I’ve completed 100%.

At the time of writing, I own 834 video games, have played 415 of them, beaten 106 of them and completed 34 of them. And that’s if I haven’t missed any of them. Also keep in mind that this doesn’t consider all the video games I have ever owned, as many of them went to trade-ins at some point. Some of them I managed to beat, some I didn’t, but at some point, I decided I wasn’t going to play them again and traded them; that information isn’t displayed here.

I had originally intended to display the graphs I’d done as a result of this, but when I’d finished writing the first draft of the blog and read it back along with the graphs, I really didn’t come out of it well at all. Suffice to say, I own too many video games and should play some more of them at least to the end credits! I’m not saying I will never display that information, but I’d rather do it at a point where I have something more positive to say about it, e.g. if next year shows any significant improvement in my spending and gaming habits. The final chart, where I ran the number of games I’d bought and beaten throughout the years, was a particular eye-opener, and I’m hoping to see an improvement in what it’s telling us for next year.

So, back to it!