As many others here, I have accumulated a bit of a “backlog” over the years, consisting of games that were cheap to pick up on sale, games that I have/had general interest in, or new game releases. Whenever a new game came out, I felt kind of urged to play the new game, drop everything else, and quite often end up not picking up the “abandoned” games again.
Sometime last year, when money was a bit tight, I just started playing games I already had instead of worrying about keeping up with new game releases, and it’s been really liberating. I finished Mass Effect 1-3 over a combined ~100h, I platinumed Sekiro, Bloodborne, and started Dark Souls and Elden Ring, I found my love for Frostpunk and have been blasting that for the past months. I’m just having a great time overall.
I think a good help in that regard was a comment I read on the rexxit equivalent of this community where they proposed to see games as countries and giving them a shot is like coming there to visit: visiting a country is cool, but you don’t have stay there indefinitely to have a good time; it’s always fine to leave the country and go visit another, and not seeing everything the country has to offer does not worsen your experience there.
I don’t stress about picking something back up again after having a good time with it and looking for something else to play. I don’t stress about new releases (too much - Diablo 4 is currently pretty difficult to stay away from for me lol) because the game won’t vanish magically if I check it out a week later, several months later, a year later. I just play whatever I feel like playing and whenever I feel like playing it. If I end up deleting something off the console - that’s fine. There’s always something else to play.
Not really sure what my point is, really, but felt inclined to get the ball rolling in this community. I like the idea of being a patient gamer a lot, and it’s helped me enjoy games a lot more than I used to, so I wanted to contribute too and be a more active part of the “movement”.
Thanks to everyone who’s part of the community and who’s been promoting good vibes!
The only games I tend to buy on release day are Nintendo games, because they hardly ever drop in price, but it often enough takes a year+ for me to get to them anyway.
I even have a beefy PC, but the recent shitstorm of horrible PC ports really does not give me any confidence or reason to play most of those games day one. I started playing RDR2 a couple of months ago for the first time, and I’m having a blast, most of the bugs fixed, besides some occasional stutter that happens on every PC, and most importantly, the game only cost me third of its original price.
Not caring about most GaaS games, the current FOTM game and FOMO in general has been really liberating, I can choose whatever I want to play, whenever I want to, instead of twitch dictating me what I’m supposed to be enjoying. I also recently bought a PSP to play all of the cool spinoff games because I never had one as a kid, and most of the games are super cheap to get, unlike the DS, so I’m reliving my childhood a bit as well.
Completely agree with your comments.
Gamer are a form of entertainment, we don’t have to force them. Enjoy them when you can and leave them when you can’t. You can always come back to a game you stopped playing, and even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, just move on to the next one.
I guess it is kind of implied that you have to finish a game once you start playing it. At least this was the case for me because I felt like I didn’t get my money’s worth out of it if I didn’t finish it. But you’re completely right.
With age, I am realizing that time is just as important a commodity as money, if not much more.
So, if I am not enjoying a 50 hours games, dropping it at 10 hours is much better than spending 40 more hours of non-enjoyment. Previously, I would try to finish it, no matter how much I didn’t like it, but now it feels like sunk-cost fallacy. Throwing away good money after bad (except time, instead of money)
With age, I am realizing that time is just as important a commodity as money, if not much more.
This is the biggest takeaway. Age really ups the value of your time.
For me getting older and having less free time killed me playing competitive online games. Is witched to games I could play solo and at my own pace.
When you only have an hour or two to play a few times (maybe) a week, you start to get good at honing in on what you actually enjoy playing.
