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blazehedgehog · 6 years

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Why do you have a 900 game backlog? Aren't you playing them? Are you buying games you're not going to play? How did this happen???

Of the 933 games I have not finished on my backlog, 715 are PC games. Of those, 525 are games I’ve never even booted up once.

The other 218 unfinished games are spread out across every game console I’ve ever owned in the last 30 years. (And at least 20-30 of those are individual episodes of Telltale games that Backloggery counts as separate products)

Is it really so difficult to imagine how one could get a backlog that big? They give away games for free now. Just on Origin, EA’s PC game storefront, I own over 40 games and I never paid a penny for any of them. Some of that was due to a coupon code error; a few years ago EA accidentally sent out $20 off coupons that weren’t restricted properly – not only could the coupon be reused multiple times, but it didn’t require a purchase, so you could just go through and buy everything they had as long as it was $20 or less (which was basically half the store). But EA also frequently just puts games up “On the House.”

Same deal for Uplay – I have never spent a single penny of my own money on Ubisoft’s digital storefront. Yet I own 14 games on Uplay, because Ubisoft gives them away for various promotions. Assassin’s Creed 2, 3, 4, Rayman Origins, Watch_Dogs, The Crew… all gotten for the grand total of $0.

Every time GOG.com has a major sale event, they seem to give away a free game with it. I have 87 games registered to my GOG account now, and I’ve paid for less than half of them. Heck, maybe even as low as less than a quarter of them. King of Fighters 2002, Carmageddon 2000, MDK, Syberia, The Witcher 2… not a single one of them cost me anything. What’s Syberia? Some kind of adventure game, I think? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play it one day. I probably won’t, but might as well get it while it’s free just in case, right? It’s not like I’m going to run out of space on my account.

Let’s talk Humble Bundle, maybe. I honestly can’t even count the number of cheap games I’ve gotten from Humble. If even a single game in a bundle looks interesting, that’s always worth the dollar minimum they require – and bundles of games add up very, very quickly. There was a period of a year or two where I was throwing at least a dollar at almost every single Humble Bundle, and when you consider Humble runs at least 2, maybe even 3 game bundles concurrently, we’re in the range of hundreds of games per year.

What about other ways to get cheap games? Early in 2012, I won a “lifetime supply” of Xbox Live Gold. It was shipped to me in a massive cardboard box as 30 individual 1-year cards. I sold most of them, but kept three years for myself, and it was a good thing, too – not long after, Microsoft launched their “Games with Gold” initiative to compete with Playstation+. That was 3-5 “free” games a month, every month, for multiple years. A lot of them I’ve never touched.

And now that I spent $60 on a year sub of Playstation+, I’m getting games as part of that subscription, now, too. I’m three months deep on that and I’m already over ten games.

There may not be such a thing as a “free lunch” but you’re basically tripping over free video games all the time if you know where to look. Who even NEEDS to pirate games anymore?

Heck, I’m swimming in so many free games I own stuff for platforms I don’t even have. I own Uncharted 3, Mirror’s Edge, Need for Speed Most Wanted, Sacred 3, Unwritten Tales 2, Psycho-Pass, Uncanny Valley, Claire, Mighty No. 9, Bombing Busters, and Legend of Kay for the PS3 and I have never owned a PS3. Pretty sure I own some Xbox One games, too.

As somebody who is trying to develop a game, all of this is actually kind of scary to think about. The inherent value of a video game is almost nothing. Hundreds of games get released on Steam every month, many of them $10 or less, some of them outright free to play. There is no reason to actually browse storefronts anymore when your library is already so huge – which is why these places give away free games to begin with! GOG.com forces you to view the front page and all of its associated promotions in order to claim their free games. Getting you to just look at what’s on sale is that important.

And for what? So your already huge collection gets even bigger? It’s the opposite of a solution, and that’s dangerous.

And if you think about it, it all started with Humble Bundle. Yes, the charity aspect of Humble is fantastic, and they’ve raised a lot of money for a lot of very important causes, but they lead the charge in devaluing games by flooding the market with large quantities of cheap software. That was then followed by the Steam sale, where, especially early on, you could pick up a publisher’s entire library of software for what would normally be the price of just a single game. And down and down and down the slippery slope we slid, until, really, a backlog of 933 unfinished games probably isn’t as uncommon as you’d think. Not when for as little as $20, you could end up with 100+ new games every year.

I mean, think about the statistic I listed earlier: out of 933 unfinished games, 715 are PC games, leaving 218 console games. In my lifetime, I’ve owned 21 game consoles (NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, Genesis, Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Atari Lynx, Game Boy, Game Gear, Gameboy Advance, DS, and 3DS). If you do a little math, that means on console, I have an average of 10 unfinished games per platform. That’s not so unreasonable, right? But on PC, where Humble Bundle lives, where so many storefronts are throwing free games at your feet in the desperate hope you’ll browse their inventory and actually buy something, it’s gotten out of control.

People are mortgaging (and remortgaging) their homes, betting their entire lives on making their dream game in a market so crowded and devalued that survival is impossible for most.

This should be worrying people a lot more than it seems to.

#questions #gamedev #steam #uplay #origin #backlog #backloggery #games #video games #humble bundle #Anonymous

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