Point, Click, Repeat

A look at how the battle against my Steam backlog stands in 2024.

I am pretty sure it was as a direct result of Wilhelm's post over at The Ancient Gaming Noob during the Blaugust of 2015.

In that very month, I had noted the following:

It would take 4056 continuous hours, or 169 days of gameplay to complete my Steam library.

- Source : defunct website steamleft

I like numbers and started to wonder how that number would look now, after countless Humble additions and Steam sales, surely my library won't have grown that much in the 9 years since I last checked, right? Right!?

Refreshing the data

Sadly steamleft is not around any longer. However, How Long To Beat steps in to offer some of the same data points we can use. It's worth noting that “How Long To Beat” also applies some exclusions that I'm not sure were in the original steamleft estimate.
Exclusions : Multiplayer only titles, Endless games & any titles it doesn't recognise.

Of my 1182 titles, it matched 1180, and only 70 are marked as excluded, giving us a solid 1110 games in scope of analysis.

Time to Beat my remaining unfinished games : 547 Days 6 Hours, which puts us at a comfortable 13134 hours for direct comparison to the last data we had.

A slight increase then

An increase of over 9000 hours, so each years purchases are adding about 1000 hours of expected playtime.

As I scroll through the list of games I am struck by how times my logged play time is higher than the How Long To Beat time. It seems that when I enjoy a game I tend to play it well beyond what others play, sometimes that is reflected in the other data timings that How Long to Beat has, such as Main Story, Main Story + Sides & Completionist.

I also had slight confusion over games that I would argue are Endless and should be excluded.

For example, Sea of Thieves and Elite: Dangerous are not excluded, but other titles like PUBG: Battlegrounds and Cities: Skylines are.

Additionally, titles like Valheim and No Man's Sky have produced more and more content over the years. One still in early access, the other already live.

Conclusion

There are many titles that have been stuck in my backlog for years, and it would be good to try some of them, as most were purchased due to an interest in the game.

I just need to add another few hours into the week to achieve it.