Gaming has never been more expensive. We’re here to investigate why, and help you play more while spending less. Welcome to GameSpot Cheap Week.
Video games have always been an expensive hobby, but lately it feels like the problem is compounding. We’re devoting the full week to finding ways to tighten your belt and get the most out of your gaming piggy bank, so among all of our other suggestions–might we also propose you play some things you already own?
Keeping costs down by playing your own games might sound obvious, but the infamous “gaming backlog” is a common gamer problem for a reason. Games can last dozens if not hundreds of hours, and especially with digital purchases, plentiful online sales, and often-cheap bundles, it’s easy to amass a collection that you just don’t play to its fullest.
Now please bear in mind, we’re not here to guilt anyone for having a backlog. Attempting to finish absolutely every game you obtain is a fool’s errand and will inevitably make your pastime feel more like a part-time job. There’s wisdom in the idea that you should treat your backlog not as a checklist, but as a library. You can curate your own collection of games that interest you knowing that some of them you’ll play to completion, some you may start and revisit, and others you may simply not play. There’s nothing wrong with leaving games unfinished, and a lot of gamers make themselves miserable feeling pressured to complete their backlog. If you don’t like it, drop it! Absolutely do not force yourself through a game you’re not enjoying.
In the context of cost-savings, though, there are probably a lot of great games you’d enjoy that you haven’t finished. In fact, there are probably games you haven’t even started. So in the spirit of saving money without sacrificing your video game time completely, we’ve put together a roadmap for how to tackle your backlog without making it feel like a second job.
Step 1: Audit Your Free Time
If you want to clean your gaming slate, you should first be brutally honest with yourself about how much gaming time you typically have in a day or week. One of the easiest ways to let your backlog get out of hand is to take on more than you can reasonably handle.
Think through how much time you can reasonably, reliably spend on games every week. Figure out a number and keep it in your head for later. On that note, though, be kind to yourself. This number isn’t a hard target that you have to hit; it’s a general guideline. Build in some wiggle room to allow yourself to do other things.
Step 2: Browse Your Library
Remember, you’re approaching your backlog like a library, not a checklist. When looking through your collection, whether physical or digital, imagine yourself browsing shelves of books to find the one that speaks to you right now. That may mean identifying your gaming mood, like whether you’d like to take on a first-person shooter or a story-rich RPG. If it helps, you can take notes on which games stand out to you as the most appealing right now, and then look for common patterns like their genre, art style, or even vibe.
This part can be as casual as you’d like. You could flip through your Steam library or stacks of game cases. But if you want to really inventory your collection, there are a few tools that might help you:
Backloggd – As you may guess from the name, this site is built to be a gaming answer to the popular movie site Letterboxd. Like that site, it lets you track your collection, mark games as finished, wishlist upcoming games, leave reviews, and even journal your experiences as you make your way through games.
InfiniteBacklog – Similar to Backloggd, this lets you track your collection and review games, but also features some gamified user-interface aspects such as experience levels for your tracked games, leaderboards, and themed challenges to complete.
GG – GG is a gaming collection app available on iOS and Android, and having it on your phone may make it more handy than other tools, depending on your preferences. Its feature set is a little simpler than the other two, but if you’re just looking for an easy way to organize your library in your pocket, it works well.
Some of these tools also feature automatic sorting options, including the ability to sort by user ratings.
Step 3: Narrowing It Down
Once you’ve gotten your collection organized, it will be easier for you to find the games that strike your interest right now. You might have found a handful or even a dozen games that you meant to go back to, and that you’d like to give another spin. So how do you select which one(s) to focus on first?
For this (and only this), we can recommend you defer to the wisdom of the crowd. There are lots of resources to find aggregated knowledge, and you can tap those resources to sort your finalists into different categories. For which games have gotten critical acclaim, you can refer to Metacritic. For popularity, you can take a look at reviews on Metacritic as well, or stores like Amazon and Steam. In the latter case, even if you’re playing a console version, the Steam reviews can help you gauge the general sentiment toward the game. And if you’re trying to balance those considerations against your time investment, you can refer to HowLongToBeat. (For double-duty, there is a Decky plugin that let you view the HLTB stats on the Steam page.)
Remember when we audited our free time in Step 1? That’s where this comes in handy. If you know you have around 10 hours of game time a week, you can apply that to the HLTB estimates to plan out how long it will take you to finish a game. How large your blocks of gaming time are might also make a difference. If you only have an hour per night you may want to stick with quicker experiences like a roguelike or an FPS. If you have a big four-hour chunk on the weekend you could reserve that for a meaty RPG or strategy game.
Again, be careful not to be overly prescriptive with this–the goal is simply to be organized and deliberate with your time, not to put pressure on yourself like a job.
Step 4: Jump Around
With very few exceptions, most gamers don’t laser-focus on one game at a time. If that’s your style, go for it, but don’t hold yourself to it. Instead, try to pick a rotation of two to four games that you’re in the mood for, using the same methodology above. Your mileage may vary, but introducing a variety to your gaming diet will often help stave off getting bored and bouncing off a single game. You could sort this in different ways–like picking different genres to scratch different gaming itches, or different game lengths to have one game that’s high-commitment and others that are more casual.
If you’re using HowLongToBeat to estimate when you’ll complete a game, just add all of them together to get a general idea of when you’ll start completing them. And if you lean much harder into one game than the others because it grabs your attention, great. That’s the whole point of going through your backlog–to rediscover great games that you had left behind.
Step 5: Check It Off The List
Ah, the satisfaction of finishing a game. Your backlog just got a little shorter, and you saved some money in the process. Congratulations.
Step 6: Go Back To It, But Only If You Want To
One advent of modern gaming is that many games don’t really end. Almost every game has some kind of post-game content, be it a New Game Plus mode, extra challenges, additional content released post-launch, or a grind for a “true” ending. At this point, you have a choice. Do you go back into a game you’ve otherwise completed to play more of it?
The answer depends entirely on how much appetite you have for more. If you feel finished, there’s nothing wrong with putting the game aside. You can always mark a game as one you’d like to go back to after giving it a little break. But if you just want to know how it ends, feel free to look up a summary or video on YouTube. Once you feel satisfied with your experience, don’t feel obligated.
Step 7: Buy Responsibly
Now that you’ve gotten into a rhythm of checking games off your backlog and saving yourself money, how do you keep yourself from letting it balloon out of control again? The best advice is to simply wait. Most of the time, you don’t need to jump on a game immediately at launch, with the rare exception of multiplayer games where you may need to play when there’s a large and active community. As a rule of thumb, try to only buy games if you plan to play them immediately. Otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with letting a game sit on your wishlist while you wait for a sale.
