It shows the amount of faith people have in the platform. You're spending money on something that requires steam to continue to exist (as well as your user account), or else the purchase was wasted.
I wouldn't advance-buy a game I wasn't sure I'd play soon on a Google or Microsoft platform. I'd lose the ability to play the take within a year!
Oh, and also I guess it speaks to the quality of the discounts available on steam.
It's my retirement plan. Buy the games now when they're on sale with the intention that one day, perhaps when I retire at 80, I'll have a plethora of time on my hands to finally play all the games in my backlog except I'm certain that I'll be so senile by then that I'll probably end up playing the same one over and over for what seems like the very first time each time I fire it up.
Here is the source article. It's light on methodology. Are they going off of price of the game at launch? I maybe pay full price for a game once or twice per year. 50-70% of my unplayed games are probably from Humble Bundle/Humble Choice.
every time this gets brought up, it rarely mentions humble bundle even though it's probably a major contributing factor.
how many of us have bought bundles for 1 or 2 games we were interested in and ended up with 10 more that you never even had an intention of booting up in the first place?
In addition to that there's also a few games in my library that I intend to play later but bought it while it's on sale as it might be more expensive when I have time to play it later...
I'd think these people probably make up a single number digit of the amount of games bought and never played.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of which games werr bought and never played.
How many of them were gifts ?
What's the share by rating ?
Even better : When were the copies the most bought but never played ? This could bring up some interesting partterns.
Which ones were ever present in humble bundles or other key bundles, what is the age of the purchase vs the age of the game, etc. I agree, a deeper understanding of the data would be great.
And that's okay. It's also not a "pile of shame". If you're in the mood to play something and then aren't, that's fine. Games are supposed to be fun. Don't treat it as an obligation. Not every fucking choice in your life needs to be financially efficient.
And yet they'll grip that game right out of your library whenever they want to. The world that people complain about is the world they go wrong with. Once the fuckery started, that's when I stopped giving these companies money. I haven't bought a video game for probably decades.
If I never play a game by an indie dev that I bought, oh noooo what a catastrophe I gave an indie artist money without confirming they deserved it!
This meme should only make you feel slimey if you are dropping lots of money on AAA games where the artists who made the game don't get even remotely a fair share of profits.
Otherwise, giving independent artists to make more art benefits everyone even if you don't "use" / "need" the art.
Sometimes during a sale, I'll ask myself: if I never get around to playing this 4.99 Indy game, will I still be glad to have given the dev some money to have made such a game? The answer is often yes.
I've got a Steam family going with my siblings and it makes me feel significantly better about my backlog, because even if I don't get to it there's probably something for everyone in the mix somewhere. Plus every now and again it's nice to break out a random indy game that nobody's played and just collectively suck together.
unpopular(?) opinion: RDR2 is a boring graphic novel deceptively advertised as an open world FPS. The pacing is slow, the gunplay is garbage, and the core 'gameplay' loop is just a chain of unskippable CGI. I bought it based on the reviews, played for about an hour while experiencing an increasing sensation of buyers remorse. Never again. It's the last game I bought without pirating it first to see if its any good.
I quite like it. Once you get used to the timings of actions you can be quite fast and fluid in combat and it's good enough to carry the game by itself, much better gunplay than gta. And the story is not the worst, though it is a slog occasionaly. Graphics do a lot of heavy lifting