Ha! Great post.
I’m well aware of this myself. It’s going to take a massive discount on pretty much anything on my wishlist for me to buy.
Great Reminder Lego.
Currently on tap:
PS4 - Bloodborne - Old Hunter’s Expansion - taking on Living Failures boss battle
PC - Overload - Descent 4 in everything but it’s name. So good.
XB1 - Wolfenstein II - Still going, still a great game
Waiting in the wings, after I’m done with those:
PS4 - Just bought Last Guardian and Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete, still have to finish Ratchet & Clank, God of War 3 and Uncharted 3.
XB1 - Replay DiRT Rally, Mad Max, Dark Souls III, Brothers
PC - State of Decay 2, Re-Core, Everspace, Tacoma, Cuphead
Polygon hammering the backlog related articles!
Actually, the have an entire week dedicated to backlogs going on!
Ah, it’s backlog week. That explains the flurry of articles about it.
I am not sure Ben Kuchera really thought out the implications of how the major publishers and platform holders ideally see the future of the games industry panning out.
If the idea of discrete game platforms dies out due to the platform agnostic rise of game streaming then why wouldn’t the major publishers eventually just cut out the middle man (Microsoft, Sony, etc) and establish their own subscription services, as they have done store-wise on PC after the rise of Steam. People already feel pressured to get the most out of a solitary paid subscription to feel like they are getting their money’s worth, WoW subs is proof enough of that, let alone if market fragmentation makes them need two or more subscriptions to play the games they are interested in.
Depending on how the market fragments, I do wonder if in the future it may become more expensive for people with wide and varied interests to partake in the hobby actually. Game franchises are going to be less prone to the kind of fragmentation across multiple services that the English Premier League broadcast rights in the UK have undergone, which has ended up costing dedicated club supporters more in the long run despite the theory that competition drives prices down, but there could well be fragmentation across many publisher lines.
I would propose that the idea of a backlog will not change greatly for anyone interested in a multitude of games. There will be pressure to extract value for money out of your active subscriptions and a backlog of subscriptions to activate if you’re interested in games on different services. Unless someone comes up with a solution to the reason why backlogs form in the first place, lack of time, then it’ll continue to exist for anyone of the mindset to feel pressured by it.
There are still people who wish Living Season One of Guild Wars 2 would come back due to missing it for one reason or another, so Games-as-a-Service can actually acerbate the backlog pressure problem if people feel they need to play something to experience content before it disappears potentially for good. So, so much for the idea that ephemeral online experiences necessarily do away with backlog.
Ok, 2019. Metro Exodus is out in a month. Need to clear some space. I let Origin’s Access thing expire so I can focus. I must admit both Kingdom Come and Subnautica have left me a bit cold. Mud sim and water sim are how they struck me, but the rest of the world can’t be wrong, so back in I go. I’m half thinking I’ll sell the Oculus once I’ve tried the must sees, so that means these two. And freebies don’t have to be finished obvs :)
Anyone else got a plan for 2019?
Finally got a new laptop so I plan to visit some of the higher-ish budget games that got sidetracked over the last few years due to lack of horsepower. Currently grinding my teeth through The Witcher 2’s bountiful supply of bugs, crashes and questionable design decisions. It’s still intriguing so I guess I’ll see it to its end.
After that, well, we’ll see what happens. The backloglands are vast.
I’d take a break before W3 then :)
Yeah, that’s very likely-- finishing the first one was exhausting already! :-P
Ahhh 2019…
I still somehow have Max Payne 3 to finish ( I am in the jungle from what I last recall) and I want to start Splinter Cell Blacklist. Both are from 2013 , so I am slowly catching up! Also hope to play Witcher 3 Blood and Wine this year. Along with wanting to finish up the 4 most recent TellTale games I bought. Add in a few hundred other games I own, that I want to play if I have time.
Oh and I bought Anno 1800 so that’s my birthday present for the end of February. :)
Also I now have a dozen or so PS4 games, so after I finish RDR2 I’ll probably move into Uncharted 3 then to 4 then The Lost Legacy.
Overall the situation seems a bit like this:
:)
In the first post in this thread I said I must remember to get to Blacklist. It’s like those time travel bits in Dishonored. Almost :)
Did you? :)
Seems so! Goddam Hadean Lands still mocks me though :(
OMG. I bought Hadean Lands directly from Zarf in what seems like ages ago. I have to admit I had all but forgotten about it. Is there no end to the shame…
Same here. It was my first kickstarter. My last too I think…
I decided I wasn’t going to stress too much in 2019 about my ever-growing backlog. I’ve realized that trying to focus on playing one or two games max to completion before moving to the next game/games is just not for me.
What was happening was that I’d force myself to play a game I was just not that into or in the mood for at the time and then end up becoming so completely turned off by it that I would consider the game a failure. But the reality is that there have been plenty of games I play for a few weeks, put down and then pick up again weeks, months, even years later and then get further enjoyment out of them after a break from some burn-out. A good example is Trails In The Sky for PSP. This JRPG received tons of acclaim so I had high expectations. I played it for about 20 hours and became completely bored with it. Continued my saved game recently after a year and managed to put 10 hours into it in one weekend and am actually enjoying it a lot this time around.
So the plan is to go back to just playing whatever i feel like playing without having the backlog over my head.
In the last two weeks I’ve played a little bit of at least 10 different titles across Xbox One, 3DS, Vita, PC and have enjoyed mostly every minute of it. Never even really got to play more than an hour of RDR2 even though I pre-ordered and highly anticipated its release. Just have not been in the mood for a western open world game so I will just get to it when I get to it.
Of course, I’m still really overwhelmed by the amount of unplayed games I have collected over the years but the new strategy is no strategy.
That’s the spirit, man. Play the game you want when you’re in the mood to play it. Let the rest take care of itself.
Quick question. If you play a game, but don’t like it, or don’t like it all that much, is that suffice to take it off your backlog?
That’s between you and your god.
I go by how much I paid for it, if its bundle fodder I give it 5 minutes to make a good impression, else its uninstalled.