No New Games For a Year

[vinraith]

Not necessarily. The DLC is counted in the Community profile, but when one views their games from the Library the number of games listed under dropdown for All is probably different. For me they are 272 and 208, respectively.

So they are. In fact it's about a 30% drop from the community count to the library count, for me. I like the library count a lot more. What I really wish I could get is a count of games bought on Steam, as opposed to games bought or registered on Steam, preferably one without the DLC number in there.

[BobsLawnService]

This year was a lean year. I bought about four or five games last year between twenty and thirty. In the new year I'll probably end up picking up Rage and Serious Sam and depending on my mood Mass Effect 3 and the new Starcraft.

[Juan Carlo]

I only have like 150 games on steam (And a good number of those are from humble bundles and the like, so it's less than it sounds), but I have a massive backlog in my "need to finish" category.

I'm actually pretty anal about finishing games, though. Even if I don't particularly like something, I will force myself to sit through it--especially if I payed money for it (I don't take the same approach to humble bundle games). So I usually play 2 or 3 at once and finish them all before moving on to the next. Having a backlog is kind of nice in that sense as you can jump from genre to genre without getting tired.

I think people jump from game to game and get scattered, though. You really do kind of have to just pick 2 games and then decide not to play anything else until they are complete if you ever want to actually finish anything. Even though I have such a huge backlog, I've played and finished tons of games this year (I've hit 30 hours a week on my steam playing time more than once this year, sad to say).

[Lightbulb]

Interesting idea. Might have to do something similar myself. At least until Guild Wars 2 is out...

You know that was EXACTLY what I was thinking. :)

No chance I will though. Bought Orcs Must Die and Fallout New Vegas only yesterday!

[Gnoupi]

You know, there is something which can be interesting, it's putting yourself a year of difference with games. Don't buy any game the year they are released. With your year of "no new game", you could do that next year.

This way, you play for cheaper with all price drops, and your hardware is cheaper as well. You can also be sure to not have "release bugs", since after a year, most games will have their issues patched (and the ones that won't will never get fixed anyway).

It also means playing Bethesda games with a real interface.

Possible drawbacks include mostly multiplayer games. The ones which are not solid enough, you won't be able to play them due to a lack of active players (see Brink, Shattered Horizon, etc).

Also, make sure to not put too much of a delay, though. One year is something, but let's not fall into this:

[Shane]

ME3 comes out in 2012. I can't abstain.

Read the leaked script to know what Bioware has turned Mass Effect into.

[Vexing Vision]

All power to you!

I am struggling hard enough with my self-imposed block on Origin-games. Mass Effect 3 (and I'm not reading any leaked script, thank you very much) will certainly test my faith. It's getting easier and easier boycotting Ubisoft games though - but not buying any games 2013? Too many highly anticipated indie-titles alone....

[Creeping Death]

I have 157 games on Steam.

How the hell do you guys do it?

Well I've been using Steam since 2004 and it was pretty much the only place I bought games from '06 to '09 because I lived in the middle of nowhere several hours from any video game stores. Even when I moved and competitive services started popping up I still usually use steam out of habit.

So yea, 500ish games over 7 years isn't so bad. I know plenty of people that buy more and are drowning in boxes now :P

[Cooper]

I'm currently trying to get out of the 'it's only worth it if I complete everything I buy' attitude I had as an adolescent. (When games were never absurdly cheap, and I didn't have as much cash to spend on games)

So, to guage if a game is 'worth it' I'm sticking to a pint-measure. Being a Londoner, a pint is somewhere about £3.

So, as long as I get (or think I will get) the pint-equivalent of enjoyment out of a game, I count it as 'worth it' a plump for the buy, even if it is something I probably wouldn;t have got otherwise.

Whilst gaming and sitting in a pub with friends are not entirely commensurate, the measure works. It means that, when I leave Torchlight untouched after a couple of hours, that's fine, because it only cost me a few quid. And when I get dozens of hours out of Fallout 3 which I nabbed in a sale; then excellent.

[Kadayi]

I've been pondering doing a year without new games myself of late. Like most my eyes have been bigger that my actual gaming capacity (not helped by my habit or replaying/restarting sprawling life consuming time vampire RPG titles) and I've a tonne of back catalogue untouched/unfinished titles that even if I wouldn't necessarily finish them, at least are deserving of some attention. Albeit I'm interested in a number of titles next year (ME3, Prey 2, Syndicate, Infinite to say a few), I'm also thinking I can hold out on them. Right now like many I'm balls deep into Skyrim (and BF3) however I think a year hiatus from new games will allow me to finally get around to tackling Fallout New Vegas (and all the associated DLC I just bought in the Steam sales), Darksiders, Starcraft 2, Fable 3, Bulletstorm, Sims Medieval and the mass of other titles I've purchased over the last few years. I don't think I'm necessarily going to play everything through to conclusion, but I would like to at least add a few more titles to the 'finished' pile.

New years obviously seems the best time to commit to this, as the bulk of the Christmas Steam sale should be out of the way.

[Kelron]

My problem is not cheap games specifically, although I'm more likely to buy a game if it's cheap. I have games I've paid something approaching full price for and I still don't play them. I'm not punishing myself so much as trying to exercise self control and actually get some enjoyment out of my games collection.

[Tikey]

I'm actually buying games only if I'm going to play it during the following month. If not I'll wait for the next sale.

[Kadayi]

I am struggling hard enough with my self-imposed block on Origin-games

I'll be honest VV, Origin is no more painful to use than Steam (in other words, not very), and is nowhere near the spyware bugbear certain people in the games press have made out (games journalists tend to be like Fox News commentators at times. Lots of wild speculation as to what it all means? But very little actual consultation with qualified experts on the reality). Fact of the matter is as a service it's not going anywhere, so there's little point in continuing to boycott EA titles, save to punish yourself tbh.

[Heliocentric]

You know that was EXACTLY what I was thinking. :)

No chance I will though. Bought Orcs Must Die and Fallout New Vegas only yesterday!

I got those and strangers wrath.

I have a rule:
Buy anything below £5 that takes my fancy and £7. 50 if I am obsessed with the title. NOTHING MORE EXPENSIVE

People derided me as a cheapskate.

Been at it for about a year come new year.

[vinraith]

It's interesting to look at Kelron's solution, my solution, and Helio's solution, and recognize that while they're wildly different they all spell trouble for the mainstream gaming industry. The present bubble is dependent on people buying far more games than they can ever play, due to the sales prices being so low. Sooner or later something's going to give.

Personally, my worry is that in a market where people won't pay more than $5 for a game, we're going to end up with nothing but games that are only worth $5. Short, simple, and disposable so they can get you to buy a new one every couple of days. This is part of the reason I'm quite content to continue to buy big, meaty games at big, meaty prices.

[Nalano]

Read the leaked script to know what Bioware has turned Mass Effect into.

Why the hell would you do that to yourself? Beyond spoiling the game for yourself, it's a work in progress.

[vinraith]

Speaking as someone who bought ME2 the day it was released on the strength of ME1, I'm definitely going to wait for reviews on ME3. And I don't mean "immediate post release gushing new-toy" reviews, I mean word of mouth a few months later. I've avoided reading the leaked script as I don't think the situation is completely hopeless, but I like very little of what I've seen about the game thus far.

[Nalano]

Speaking as someone who bought ME2 the day it was released on the strength of ME1, I'm definitely going to wait for reviews on ME3. And I don't mean "immediate post release gushing new-toy" reviews, I mean word of mouth a few months later. I've avoided reading the leaked script as I don't think the situation is completely hopeless, but I like very little of what I've seen about the game thus far.

I bought it then, too, and aside from the "why the hell am I siding with Cerberus" idiot plot, I found it to be much more playable than the original and the interactions with my companions and important NPCs to be quite enjoyable.

[vinraith]

I bought it then, too, and aside from the "why the hell am I siding with Cerberus" idiot plot,

By virtue of the kind of character I'd built for ME1 (a very specific kind of renegade) that stuff REALLY bothered me. To give you an idea, my reaction to (SPOILER) the crew being liquified because I didn't go to the final confrontation fast enough was "good." "My" people survived, all the Cerberus drones died, that's the "good" ending as far as my character was concerned. The only down side is that I was never able to eject that damned AI into a nearby star.

I found it to be much more playable and the interactions with my companions and important NPCs to be quite enjoyable.

The character interactions were better, the lack of the old inventory system was obviously no loss, but the whole thing just felt so... insubstantial from a mechanical perspective. It was all "going through the motions to get to the next conversation/cinematic/plot point" because there was nothing interesting about the game mechanics. That's a real loss, IMO, and makes the game a lot less enjoyable for me.

All that said, while ME2 certainly didn't convince me to buy ME3, it wouldn't convince me not to either. ME3 is losing me on the strength (or lack there of) of its own marketing and design decisions, prior to recent prepress I'd assumed I'd buy it pretty early on.

[Nalano]

By virtue of the kind of character I'd built for ME1 (a very specific kind of renegade) that stuff REALLY bothered me. To give you an idea, my reaction to (SPOILER) the crew being liquified because I didn't go to the final confrontation fast enough was "good." "My" people survived, all the Cerberus drones died, that's the "good" ending as far as my character was concerned. The only down side is that I was never able to eject that damned AI into a nearby star.

My ME1 character was a sole survivor who killed a lot of Cerberus. My ME2 character was given no choice to stick it to Cerberus until the very end (and was, sadly, unsuccessful in offing Miranda, despite every possible attempt godIhatethatbitch). I didn't like that. But I did like that Paragon/Renegade was not Good/Bad but more Diplomatic/Violent, and as such didn't mind collecting points in either side towards my preferred playstyle of being nice to people I like and a badass to people I hate. It was far easier to do so in ME2 than ME1, for sure.

I concede that it sometimes feels too Hollywood, in that all this gleam and marketing is getting in the way of actually making a game, but I can still name and cite my opinion on every single companion and half the NPCs I came across, which is a feat in itself and a credit to the writers.