Normally, I’m not ashamed of my video game backlog. Sure, I have an impossible number of games to play, but that just means that I am never bored. Still, I recently did an inventory of how many games I own on How Long to Beat, and it turns out I have about 1,800 games backlogged across all of my systems. That’s…bad, to say the least, and with the holiday sales coming up, I’m worried this number will only get worse.
To try and counter this, I’m going to to institute a 1:1 ratio of games buying for the foreseeable future. Basically, I can only buy new games at the rate that I finish them. This will exclude my monthly game subscriptions, like Playstation Plus, so it still won’t totally fix my backlog problem, but it will at least keep my monthly video game spending down for a while as I work through the games I currently own.
Of course, I have to institute some ground rules here in order to keep myself honest. If I wanted to just finish every tiny game I own, I could easily finish a few dozen games in the span of a week or two. Trying to keep myself from doing that puzzled me for a while, but I think I have a solution. I am going to buy games with similarities to what I have finished. These similarities can be loose, based on genre, game length, or some common attribute between the two titles, but it will prevent me from finishing a two hour game and then buying a sixty hour JRPG.
Finally, since I want to keep myself honest, I will be reporting what I buy, and what I finished in order to allow myself to buy these games. I’ll do checkups every few months, and give mini-reviews of everything I finished, and give the game I bought in exchange, if applicable. I’ve been trying to work out a system to bring reviews back to my blog when I don’t always have enough thoughts to put out a full review of every game I play, and I think some mini-updates every couple of months will work.
This new system is still in flux, so I’ll continue to change and evolve it as needed. The overall goal is that I shrink my backlog over the coming months and years, which means ideally buying less games than I finish, but for now, attempting to hold my backlog number relatively steady will be a step in the right direction.
How do you tackle your backlog? Let me know in the comments below!
Note: This post is imported from a prior blog, HannieBee Games.
The Hannie Corner 
For me, it got to the point where I simply had to let go of a large portion of my backlog. I started prioritizing games that I KNEW I needed to play and crossed off ones that looked fun, but didn’t have me chomping at the bit. I still have some I need to play and some to cross out, but it made my list feel much more manageable!
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I’m working on that myself, as well. I’m basically creating yay and nay categories on Steam and dividing games between the two. That in itself will take months to do, though, so the game buying ban will help in the meantime 😋
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Sounds like a solid plan! Good luck!
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“How do you tackle your backlog?”
I don’t. I gave up. It’s physically impossible. Even if I never buy another game again (and who am I kidding, that isn’t going to happen), I still have too many games to get through. Sure, like you, I could clear out a bunch of shorter games and that would be a nice dent but then the hard work of 40, 50, 60+ hour games kicks in and you can’t do 60+ hour RPG after 60+ hour RPG, you’d get burned out. So… I’ve decided, I’ll get to them when I get to them… or I won’t.
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More like the backlog tackles me. I try still to prioritise games, but most of the times it’s of no use. My blog has helped me somewhat in that I buy fewer AAA games (that have around 30 hours of gameplay each) and focus on more indie games (that may even have 3-5 hours start to finish). Also, since my backlog has been indie games anyway, I at least tried the games that I had, even played them for at least 5 hours before posting an article. But even that measure fell short when I started buying more, little gems that picked my interest at some point or another. I try not to think about it, like all the books that I’ll never manage to read, the series/films I’ll never manage to watch etc.
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