How to Deal with your Gaming Backlog

Deserves more views ✨️

Part of it for me is that playing games on my PC is "easier" in a way than getting up to play on my consoles. I lay in my bed alot, but mostly the reason lies within the fact that I frequently flip through things not staying on one thing for 30 minuets.

Where I am at the moment is having that backlog of things that interest me, but not buying from that list until I finish a game (non full completion). I use a google spreadsheet.

Honestly I just make myself play an hour of whatever game I have backlogged. I’ve realized that I have too many games to dedicate a good majority of time to but if I can dedicate an hour to each one vs two to three I’ve found that going thru my backlog is way easier and makes me enjoy games more. I also had this anxiety of “fuck I forgot how to play the game” but each video game is like riding a bike all over, you don’t really forget the core mechanics.

I struggle with this alot especially because i game with friends alot and we have it set up were we play 1 game and complete it fully and go to the next one but it never works out this way as either 1 of get bored of it or a new game comes out and we all disappear doing our own thing xD which i wouldnt normally mind but it feels unfilling to not finish the game out fully but also sucks to continue without them

Awesome video super underated

Totally thought I was watching at least a 100k view video... keep up the grind because with this quality it will DEFINETLY pay off.

Guess it's time for me to get back to my backlog with these tips.

Such a great topic for a video

One great tip I'd recommend is removing EVERYTHING from your backlog and starting over. Remove your wishlisted games (Steam, PlayStation, etc), and start adding games that you think of.

There's a good chance you'll remove TONS of games that at one point you might've thought were interesting, but now you wouldn't give a second thought. But removing individually would take ages so removing everything and adding only what currently is intriguing is a good bet.

In 2024 you should have watched LOTR by now. Literally no excuses is justified

I just play long enough to know if I want to invest more. Sometimes a game’s UI, or main game loop, or clunky controls, etc, can be enough for me to permanently shelf a game. Example: old Total War games, or just old games in general; “what do you mean I can’t bind wasd to move the camera?”

Other times, a game’s gameplay or story or character design, etc, can be enough for me to overlook things I don’t like. Example: Hades, which is a roguelike game, but has a solid story & great combat gameplay.

Hey mate just stumbled upon your channel. Really high value videos and encouraging me to really double down on my games on my backlog. Keep up and i am thrilled on your future videos.

Thanks for making this video, we need more in this community

Dont buy anymore games.

Play the games that you want to the most.

Play until you have had enough. Not until youve completed it.

Great video! I don’t think of my backlog so much as a “backlog”, more like a “wishlist” of games I plan to play. Unfortunately my taste in games exploded to include several more genres than before, so my wishlist suddenly grew from 20 or so to almost 300 games in just a couple of years, especially when I started realizing that Final Fantasy isn’t the only great JRPG series out there… fortunately many of my new wishlisted games are shorter indie games and very few are AAA 100+ hour games, so I guess I have that going for me. :-)
The only problem with my “wishlist” approach is that I tend to start burning out on the games I currently play just because I know what awesome games lie in wait that I can’t wait to get to, and that could definitely ruin the last part of an otherwise great game…

This is what happened to me lately.

I was busy playing Last of Us 1 for PC during April and May and then Ghost of Tsushima released on PC on May or June i believe. And then, i got excited and started playing Ghost of Tsushima instead of completing last of Us lol. And then later, elden ring dlc released and i was like holy shit i have to play elden ring dlc first and then i would play GoT.

And then completed elden ring dlc and jumped on finishing half of the main story of GoT. But then, GoW ragnarok arrived on PC. And guess what happened?😂 I did the same thing with ragnarok and left behind GoT to complete ragnarok. Now, currently I'm about to start the dlc called Valhalla.

So, basically I just couldn't play GoT and Last of Us 1 bcoz i was kinda tempted to play other far more exciting titles. Which is why GoT and Last of Us 1 became my backlog unfortunately. Also i haven't started Cyberpunk's dlc yet so like there's lots of backlog remaining.

And the sad part is, I'm in no mood to play last of Us 1 or GoT after beating Valhalla. I want to complete them but i'm just not interested in them anymore idk why😔

Would you recommend focusing on one game at a time or having a couple going for the variety and to prevent burnout?

And here I was worried I have like 5 games remaining in my backlog, games I bought, but haven't played so far. I managed to clear 1, I finished New Vegas a few days ago. Now, I can say I played it, although there was still a lot of stuff to go through. I won't buy anything until I decide what to do about the rest of them. Honestly, I'm not really in the mood to play some of them and I think I'm going to just hide them, like they don't exist.

Looking at the analytics of all videos related to backlog, it surely does seem there is a crisis in this area. Great video 👍

thank you for making this video

Any way of importing your Excel sheet and uploading it to google sheets or something similar where you could share it?

A problem i also experience is the need to finnish what i start even when im not really enjoying it that much but a fix ive found is creating a seperate folder called no willpower to finnish where i plop all those games and ive added around 6 games every year so for me it helps with choice paralysis

one at a time is the best method. slow and steady, don't rush 👌 the pandemic really helped me clear my backlog and 5 years later, I'm damn near finished 😂

i have a backlog of 11... but i also have an additional 3 where i want the achievements...
it's not much in comparison to others... but i spend most of my gaming time in 2 live service game which take up most of the time, so i just don't really get to tackle the others very often, and i don't want to stop playing those 2 because i enjoy them...

Wow! this is your most popular vid yet and I can see why 😊 Keep up the gd work you just earnt a subscriber !!

"Everything in the Backlog will get played eventually"

* Looks at Backlog of over 1500 games *

🥲👍

I have deleted my backlog because it added more stress ,so now I'm playing whatever matches my mood from my collection and from my brother's collection of games and if it's not working for me I'm moving on to something else.

One tactic that works for me is to play the majority of my backlog on easier modes, and maybe save the harder modes for games you CRAVE for challenges.

I recently bought a Steam Deck, and that’s meant that for the first time ever, I’m no longer restricted in what I can play due to hardware limitations. So for me, it’s been the opposite issue. I didn’t have trouble trying to figure out what I wanted to play, but rather, I suddenly had the desire to play everything - all at the same time. Literally, I just went through the list: “Wanna play that. Wanna play that. Wanna play that…”

My first step was to break everything down into three lists: wishlist, in library, and replay. Wishlist is for new games that I’ve bought / will buy; in library is for stuff I already own that I’ve not played; and replay is for stuff I want to play through again.

The goal is to play through one game from each list at a time, kind of as a “set” basically. At the moment it’s Elden Ring (Wishlist), ANNO: Mutationem (In Library), and Spyro Reignited (Replay). I restrict myself to playing those games until I finish/quit them, but within that group of three I can freely swap back and forth between them whenever I start feeling burnout.

It’s a good balance between freedom and commitment that ensures progress is actually made, because historically I’ve started countless games and then “forgot” to finish them.

I have 1500+ game in my backlog so I just turned them into my collections. I have no intention to finish them now. So my actual backlog is not probably 30. And yet with only 320 hr played so far this year, I don’t see myself finish this trimmed down version any time soon