The Frugal Gamer

I was unaware of any particular change, but at some point it appears that I have become a very frugal person. I will freeze and shiver under heavy blankets all night long rather than turn my heat on too early in the season. Why buy a ton of stuff to fill your apartment, if you've got everything you need in a box full of good books and your computer? And why would I pay full price for a brand new game, (not to mention the hardware necessary to run new games,) when I can wait for a year or two and get AAA titles at bargain bin prices?!

Don't even get me started about Steam sales... it is unbelievable how I've been able to buy literally thousands of dollars worth of games over the past few years, while actually ponying up only a few hundred bucks. We're talking across years here, I rarely spend more during a Steam sale than I pay for a single steak dinner.

Of course, this has created one small problem for me. I tend to snag a lot of great looking games for cheap, which is great, except that I literally never finish all the games I own. Don't misunderstand me; I'm plugging along, beating games as I can... no, what I mean is that the massive virtual pile of unplayed games continues to grow far faster than the meager pile of games I beat.

Then again, even putting things into two discrete camps like that isn't really accurate. My two favorite genres are RPGs and sandbox games... so beating a sandbox game generally means you've just barely scratched the surface, and RPGs usually have at least two different stories based on choices the player made during the play-through. So even if I've beaten a game, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm done playing it.

Only if I won the lottery would I hope to ever have enough time to catch up on my gaming. Until then, I suppose you could more accurately classify me as a video game collector. Coincidentally, I do (upon rare occasion) enjoy various parts of my immense collection.

Full disclosure: I actually only own about 230 games, with fifteen or so of those being Humble Bundles that I still haven't bothered to redeem. (I hope those don't expire!) Although this feels like a mountain of games to me, especially considering how many of them are 4x sandbox games that literally can take several days of playing to complete a single play-through, I can naturally understand that there are some titans out there whose collection likely dwarfs my own.

So how many games do you own, and how many of those have you never played?