How much is "too much"?

[Hikari.EXE]

I have been thinking here, I have a lot of games I want to play.
Both games I do own bought with my money, and others that I have "miraculously" adquired through "unknown" means, but as I tought more about it a feeling of uneasiness settled in, how many games do I want to play?

After counting both legit and un-legit libraries I reached the final tally: almost over 500 games of different genres and playtime... That's a lot of games!
Now, I don't regret both buying and downloading many of these games since I do plan on playing them all, but the tought provoking question would be: If I wake up dead tomorrow, then what? Will the unplayed games in my drivers just... be left there, with no one to play them?
A silly little question since games are inanimate objects, but it does put into perspective this horder mindset I kind of have (?), I don't have feelings of FOMO but there was this time where I used to frequent a ROMs website, and suddenly the next day it disapeared! (I think we all know what happened...) So I started to hoard games in the fear of losing them again, admitly not a healthy mindset but hey better safe than sorry.

But going back to what I was saying, "How much is too much?" and my answer is: As much as your passion allowes it.
Let's be real, we will probably never finish our backlog, and that's fine, play what you want to play, there's nothing worse than playing something you're not feeling rn just to check that mark on your backlog, hell you might even start to dislike a game that you would other wise love if you felt like playing it. Like Garnt, from the Trash Taste podcast, once said: "We already worry so much about our work, relationships and life in general. Why should we worry about how we enjoy our hobbies?" sometimes, you want to just fastball through several games because nothing grasped you yet, sometimes you just want to hyperfocus on one game for an entire month just because it gripped you with it's gameplay, and sometimes you just don't feel like playing at all and try something else that captured your interest, and all of it is just fine. But there is something you shouldn't do, and that is to force yourself to play something just to get it out of the way.

...That's it, thank you for coming to my TedTalk, you can go now. Unless you want to stay and give me your opinion, then feel free to comment bellow! ???

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

I don't get people who buy games they never play like bro thats basically wasting money.

Never hoarded games or whatever is that if I want to play a game I download that game and that game only anything else is a waste of space if I'm not gonna play it.

 

[Hikari.EXE]

I don't get people who buy games they never play like bro thats basically wasting money.

Never hoarded games or whatever is that if I want to play a game I download that game and that game only anything else is a waste of space if I'm not gonna play it.

Well yeah, but you never know. Like I said, many ROM sites get taken down because of copyright laws, and that game you want is on sale right now on Steam and the sale ends in an hour! These are oportunities that a lot of people don't want to miss out on, so they'll buy and download games that they know they won't play right now because of the fear of never being able to play them again.

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

Well yeah, but you never know. Like I said, many ROM sites get taken down because of copyright laws, and that game you want is on sale right now on Steam and the sale ends in an hour! These are oportunities that a lot of people don't want to miss out on, so they'll buy and download games that they know they won't play right now because of the fear of never being able to play them again.

So It is fear of missing out in the end

For me everygame I play I upload to drive to keep it in the future.

 

[Hikari.EXE]

So It is fear of missing out in the end

For me everygame I play I upload to drive to keep it in the future.

No, I still wouldn't categorize what I have as FOMO since the modern take on FOMO is more akin to artificial scarcety and predatory tactics, what I have is more concern for the disaperance of gaming, like games that only a double digit amount of people played it, now lost forever in the halls of time. I suppose it is the obligation of this forum and by extension Spike.

Do you have games that you plan on playing on your drive? If not, if they disapeared tomorrow, what would you do? You don't have a copy of them anywhere else...

 

[AxeHammer]

I don't get people who buy games they never play like bro thats basically wasting money.

Never hoarded games or whatever is that if I want to play a game I download that game and that game only anything else is a waste of space if I'm not gonna play it.

i for one i'm actually glad that i hoarded games when i was younger and had expendable money, i didn't have anything else to use it for and now that i don't have money at least i have a lot of things to play

 

[Prism_Red]

Believe it or not, I already told my friends and family that if I'm gone, most stuff in my HQ will go to their respective new owners.
In case of games and consoles it will still stay here, I've told my friends they are free to come and play all they want, just keep the place clean.

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

No, I still wouldn't categorize what I have as FOMO since the modern take on FOMO is more akin to artificial scarcety and predatory tactics, what I have is more concern for the disaperance of gaming, like games that only a double digit amount of people played it, now lost forever in the halls of time. I suppose it is the obligation of this forum and by extension Spike.

Do you have games that you plan on playing on your drive? If not, if they disapeared tomorrow, what would you do? You don't have a copy of them anywhere else...

Its more of me modding the game and wanting my original save file saved so maybe many years later I can comeback to the very first save I had.

Well also I wanted to save games I don't want to look for if something happens to my reliable dealer.

Also on drive you ensure fast download speed , now I did get FF9 on drive still haven't played it yet as I'm going through this glorified FF battle system known as tactics.

i for one i'm actually glad that i hoarded games when i was younger and had expendable money, i didn't have anything else to use it for and now that i don't have money at least i have a lot of things to play

It can work both ways hoarding can be good or bad depending on the person

 

[Pearly]

I kinda have this, sorta, maybe?, the kinda hoarding like behaviour....

I got a vita recently and put everything I ever liked and everything I plan on playing at some point on there.

I filled out 512gb, easy too, not filler, just everything ever that I've played, liked or that I am curious about across the retro consoles and then psp and vita games.

I was able to remap the controls on the art dink psp macross games and I've been glued to those since, even though many games were great on the psp but had bad or even just awkward controls and the vita alleviates this issue with those games. The 3rd birthday was seriously hampered by needing a right stick.

I won't ever be able to play everything on there, only what I feel like playing and I would guess that I have a habit of getting games that interest me due to them being on sale "right now" on my ps5, this would cause things to pile up, that said I haven't bought any ps5 games since December and my wish list is very small.

I wanted to play Lightning returns since its release, I even bought it physically on launch, and I marathoned it over last December and then finished 13 right afterwards as I felt nostalgic for them.

I think most of us have a lot of games but rotate the same few or even just marathon a specific series based on what we're feeling like. I think book owners, movie buffs and such, do the same thing.

I don't think its a great mindset to see things as a to do list, it's an odd way to view a hobby and makes it a chore.

No, I still wouldn't categorize what I have as FOMO since the modern take on FOMO is more akin to artificial scarcety and predatory tactics, what I have is more concern for the disaperance of gaming, like games that only a double digit amount of people played it, now lost forever in the halls of time. I suppose it is the obligation of this forum and by extension Spike.

Do you have games that you plan on playing on your drive? If not, if they disapeared tomorrow, what would you do? You don't have a copy of them anywhere else...

This sounds like a type of hoarding based on an anxiety stemming from the idea that gaming will vanish, it's likely how the first humans that insisted on archiving everything came to be, and then we had libraries .

The idea that, If all things are not copied and stored, we will lose everything and we can't get it back.

There is merit to the notion though, and it can be a good thing.

I recall a time when megaman X3, my favourite game as a kid, existed in my local rental store, and if anything happened to that game, as far as I knew, I could never play it again, same for symphony of the night. I was not able to cobble £49.99 together as a 7 year old. So buying it was off the table. Sure enough someone actually cracked the disc and it didn't work anymore. I didn't have internet back then and the only person I knew with a CD recorder, his dad was a computer scientist.

I couldn't play either of those games till the nostalgia baiting re-release train occurred in 2006.
I was teenager before I heard the music and played through it again.

I treasure my ps1 physical copies of Macross:DYRL and dragon ball the legend, however I have mostly digital copies of everything else, except my blu ray collection and some art books as I don't have the room for physical copies of everything.

Cheers for the archivists that keep our hobby alive!!

.....and free up my physical storage space by filling out 512gb on my vita

 

[glokglakglak]

i used to hoard shitload of anime and hentai

then me running out of space was the point where i said "aight that's enough" ?
my life was literally 80% collecting anime, 20% watching them
over time my library grew to more than 2 TB (and this was when i encoded my own anime for space reasons) and i lost 2 TB of em in a portable that went bad (fuckin WD, fuckin portable hard drives)

then i started anew and i guess it was a wake up call
i deleted all my JAV, i deleted a shitload of hentai, and i even deleted a bunch of anime that i had amassed when i had to start over just to control the limited space i have (but mostly it was shows that already watched at least once)

but i guess now one thing that would make sense to hoard would be PC games, like the latest shit uploaded on cs.rin
since fitgirl doesn't 100% of the time have the most up-to-date version on her site, let alone ALL games for that matter, i decided to try saving things that i figured would be next to impossible to get again in the future because files are literally hosted on sites for a limited time before they're taken down
one such file that i absolutely cannot let go of is the japanese depot of DQXI S (you literally won't find it anywhere else on the internet)
and 2 games whose jap depots i've been waiting on for a long time were disgaea 1's and disgaea 2's (holy fuck bless Owla for sharing them)

so yeah hoarding is an act brought about by the fear of losing accessibility to it in the future and is meant to save a lot of time by having everything readily at one's disposal
one thing i do better now is delete every anime i finish watching, cos i figured out a way to keep something of the anime even after deleting it: saving screenshots
now i don't have to browse through an anime just to be reminded of the experience; i can just go through the screenshots i took of it

was literally spose to end my post at the 2nd line but i just felt compelled to share ?

 

[Karlthe4Game]

l'll probably clean up some of my storage thank you guys for giving me your viewpoints

 

[King Koopa's iconKing Koopa]

As long as you're happy and spending responsibly I don't think there's such a thing as too much. I love having access to so many different games. Kid me couldn't even imagine this being a reality.

 

[J.F.C]

I don't get people who buy games they never play like bro thats basically wasting money.

Never hoarded games or whatever is that if I want to play a game I download that game and that game only anything else is a waste of space if I'm not gonna play it.

Same here. I make sure i beat every game i can't get a refund for or download even if it's rancid shit.

 

[arcvox]

I think the hoarding aspect isn't without merit - like you never know if certain media might just stop existing at any point, there are no guarantees and physical collections are increasingly difficult to acquire. Sometimes it's better to have and not want to play, then want to play but not have. At least, those are my thoughts!

Funnily enough, I don't really collect ANYTHING physical. But I do kind of hoard media. I have several tb of movies and tv shows on a home server I can access anywhere with an internet connection so maybe that scratches my itch so to speak. And for me, gaming is not so different.

 

[Zerpina]

@Hikari.EXE I'll keep my Answer short and Sweet.
Sometimes, Less is more.
Myself as i have stated, many times about My Batocera machine. over 2500 games. years of Collecting and "Legal backups".

And i know I'll never play them all. Like you i always feared the "What if?"

And i am at a point, aside a Few games on handheld anymore i Tote with me And Some Dreamcast games, I Can't deiced what to play Vs. if i only had a dozen or so games, a choice would be easy.

 

[Antilocal123]

I think there’s nothing wrong since you’ll never know if you’ll play them in the future, nor if the game will become unresponsive in future purchases.

That said, there should be a limit on spending because it’s a want at the end of the day, once that want outspends the needs than you’re going too far and need to check yourself lmao

 

[faceless0man]

I have been thinking here, I have a lot of games I want to play.
Both games I do own bought with my money, and others that I have "miraculously" adquired through "unknown" means, but as I tought more about it a feeling of uneasiness settled in, how many games do I want to play?

After counting both legit and un-legit libraries I reached the final tally: almost over 500 games of different genres and playtime... That's a lot of games!
Now, I don't regret both buying and downloading many of these games since I do plan on playing them all, but the tought provoking question would be: If I wake up dead tomorrow, then what? Will the unplayed games in my drivers just... be left there, with no one to play them?
A silly little question since games are inanimate objects, but it does put into perspective this horder mindset I kind of have (?), I don't have feelings of FOMO but there was this time where I used to frequent a ROMs website, and suddenly the next day it disapeared! (I think we all know what happened...) So I started to hoard games in the fear of losing them again, admitly not a healthy mindset but hey better safe than sorry.

But going back to what I was saying, "How much is too much?" and my answer is: As much as your passion allowes it.
Let's be real, we will probably never finish our backlog, and that's fine, play what you want to play, there's nothing worse than playing something you're not feeling rn just to check that mark on your backlog, hell you might even start to dislike a game that you would other wise love if you felt like playing it. Like Garnt, from the Trash Taste podcast, once said: "We already worry so much about our work, relationships and life in general. Why should we worry about how we enjoy our hobbies?" sometimes, you want to just fastball through several games because nothing grasped you yet, sometimes you just want to hyperfocus on one game for an entire month just because it gripped you with it's gameplay, and sometimes you just don't feel like playing at all and try something else that captured your interest, and all of it is just fine. But there is something you shouldn't do, and that is to force yourself to play something just to get it out of the way.

...That's it, thank you for coming to my TedTalk, you can go now. Unless you want to stay and give me your opinion, then feel free to comment bellow! ???

ey man its alright ı get ya
ım a game horder
nintendo wii 170 games
ps2 150 games
ps3 30 games no digital games yet tho going to mod soon
pc 306 games

and ı played like 80 games on pc lol
20 on wii
15 on ps3
but ı dıd played all the games on ps3 just not the newst ones because of time resons

why I DO İT is for pc because we go trough eceonamic crisis and my money worth is going 10 pecant up and down everyday so ı just buıld a libary of games ı MİGHT play and for future resons

 

[Graw]

I'm sort of like that. I download a bunch of games intending to play them. I end up playing one of them then I hold on to the ones I didn't end up playing until I end up needing more space for something else.

and wanting my original save file saved so maybe many years later I can comeback to the very first save I had.

I used to be like that but over the years all that shit kinda just disappeared so I got over it. Now I just treat games like the nes days and assume I'm just going to start everything over again on replays.

 

[Konatalzumi]

I don't get people who buy games they never play like bro thats basically wasting money.

Never hoarded games or whatever is that if I want to play a game I download that game and that game only anything else is a waste of space if I'm not gonna play it.

so true, I only buy games I have issues getting through uhh other methods, like if the steam deck controls dont work on a "3rd party" copy of yakuza 0, then sure, I'll buy it. it's very rare when I buy steam games though. I only buy if it's 1 of 3 things, 1. the "3rd party" copy is having issues 2. it's multiplayer 3. it has a steam workshop

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

I used to be like that but over the years all that shit kinda just disappeared so I got over it. Now I just treat games like the nes days and assume I'm just going to start everything over again on replays.

I'm trying not to lose the save files just a good memory.

so true, I only buy games I have issues getting through uhh other methods, like if the steam deck controls dont work on a "3rd party" copy of yakuza 0, then sure, I'll buy it. it's very rare when I buy steam games though. I only buy if it's 1 of 3 things, 1. the "3rd party" copy is having issues 2. it's multiplayer 3. it has a steam workshop

Yes that's a way to save the game version cuz first time install you had difficulty finding it and if you liked the game and will comeback to it you will want it saved that's a valid reason to hoard.

 

[stealthRUSH]

I switched my focus from merely acquiring to completing games I have. What helped me was to sell 90% of my collection to get out of the mindset instead give more time to finish the games starting with my favorites.

HowLongToBeat is a good place log your progress, I use this website to keep track of games I'm currently playing, plan to, and a realistic backlog (not many RPGs for example). My top priority are my favorite games, or games I'm the most interested in not always particularly popular for example.

Thanks to The Repo, Archive, I don't feel the need to have hundreds of saved files of games on my computer, instead a handful I realistically plan to play in the near future to avoid hording mentality.

I made a cap of 100 games per section (playing, next up, backlog) to not go overboard. That being said I'm 20 games over in one section that needs to be cut down lol. So far it's been working for me, last year I've completed roughly 80 games.

 

[Hikari.EXE]

I think there’s nothing wrong since you’ll never know if you’ll play them in the future, nor if the game will become unresponsive in future purchases.

That said, there should be a limit on spending because it’s a want at the end of the day, once that want outspends the needs than you’re going too far and need to check yourself lmao

Oh don't worry about it, never used "need" money for buying silly shit lol.

 

[Gold]

I don't get people who buy games they never play like bro thats basically wasting money.

Never hoarded games or whatever is that if I want to play a game I download that game and that game only anything else is a waste of space if I'm not gonna play it.

Wouldn't it fall into the category of collecting at that point? There are a lot of things people collect that more or less just collect dust after all, this is just a collection you have the option to do more with if you choose. I'll sometimes purchase games that are on sale with no immediate intention of playing them just so they're available in case I'm ever looking for something fresh.

 

[Pandaprewmaster325]

Wouldn't it fall into the category of collecting at that point? There are a lot of things people collect that more or less just collect dust after all, this is just a collection you have the option to do more with if you choose. I'll sometimes purchase games that are on sale with no immediate intention of playing them just so they're available in case I'm ever looking for something fresh.

Not a fan of collecting just for collecting either and make it sit on a desk with no other use.

If the thing im collecting is usable then I'm putting it to use if it has to occupy space in my place it has to earn it

 

[RanmyakuIchi's iconRanmyakuIchi]

I used to hoard games quite a bit years ago, and it came in pretty clutch when I ended up having some fanatical hardships. I still had a bunch of stuff that was new (for me) to play without spending more at the time.