I suspect that this article will not be posted by the time another Steam sale occurs. I don’t keep up with them anymore, unless I remember what season it is; however, I hope you’ll reread this whenever the next sale happens. Maybe you’ll think twice, and prevent dust from falling out of your wallet where cash should be, left to consider playing but ignoring the games you’ve added to your seemingly neverending backlog.
The first step I took to no longer worrying about my backlog is to stop caring about Steam sales. I understand that there’s a psychological reason why people–I’m no exception–buy bundles of cheap AAA and indie games. I personally stuck with the indie games, because even in the midst of a sale, they tend to be the cheapest, and I might be able to finish them. How could I resist?
Except the problem is that most of the time I wouldn’t care about most of the other games I purchased along with my target game, and I suspect people are the same. I mean, when was the last time you went on Twitter during a sale and not heard someone say heard someone say something along the lines of “ouch, my wallet”?
According to Psychology in Games , a few factors contribute to our overspending, such as artificial scarcity, psychological reactance, and random reward schedules; it’s worth reading the article for the full definitions, but basically those Steam cards and flash deals are designed to entice you into parting with more money than you had intended. You don’t necessarily have to fall for it, but it does explain why you fell for it, and the lessons apply to your purchasing decisions outside of the games industry.
Anyway, the result of these effects is me purchasing many mediocre games like Fowl Space and regretting it, much like waking up after having blacked out from a night of drinking and then checking my bank account. So I decided to scale my spending back, focusing on the games that I’ve researched and truly interested me. However, I don’t condemn the practice of Steam sales. Some developers don’t lament selling their games at ridiculously discounted costs because they see the sales as opportunities for reaching potential customers who may have otherwise never have given them a shot, and vice versa. Plus, if you budget properly, then maybe you can work out a way to buy as many games as you can and still leave money in the bank. Whether or not you get to those games…well, that’s up to you. I prefer buying games that I know I’ll invest my time in; it makes navigating my library less time consuming.
Matthew Hayes wrote a post about why he feels it’s not that important complete a game , and I tend to agree with him; although, he focused his argument on whether or not completing a game validates your opinion of the game, I have applied his arguments to how I view my backlog. In my case, I’d like to get enough playtime with each one, but I’m not going to go to my death bed with my backlog being my biggest regret.