Buying Games and Never Playing Them

It’s an ailment for some gamers: Games go on sale for ridiculously low prices, gamers throw money at the screen and then said game(s) spend eternity gathering dust. Even games with fantastic reviews like the Bioshock series that deserve at least several hours of play are left neglected by people like me.

For PC gamers (computer/laptop gamers), Steam is a vital gaming platform. Every winter and summer, Steam has a gigantic sale that has fantastic deals on many popular and obscure titles. In the Steam Summer Sale, I found a fantastic deal on the previously mentioned Bioshock series. For $15 I could have the Bioshock trilogy, when normally the games added up were equal to $70. 

Gabe Newell depicted as a radiant lord with the sales he creates

Insta-bought. Not even any regret until the school year started about two months later and I still hadn’t even touched the games. Let’s not even talk about the Steam Winter Sale.

 I’m not the only one, as reported by Martin Gaston and calculated by Ars Technica: 37% of Steam games haven’t been played a single time. A huge percentage made even bigger when you consider 781 million games have been bought and registered to millions of user and that was just in April 2014. There is quite a difference between owning a game and playing it, evidently.

There are many limitations and generalizations to this stat though. It is calculated by the top 20 games played on Steam and applies it to the rest of Steam games. Some people set their profiles to private and mess with the random sampling used to calculate. But, with a margin of error of 0.33% and tweaks from Steam developers, Ars Technica seems to be nearly correct on its estimates.

While it’s nice to know I’m not alone in abandoning games, I’m still not sure why people don’t play the games they buy. For me, time isn’t an excuse, because I had most of summer break, some weekends and most of winter break to play even one hour of Bioshock, Bioshock 2 or Bioshock Infinite. Naturally, homework, other games and the occasional book always seem to detract me from playing any of the three fantastic games.

I think it’s akin to a collector’s mentality where it is necessary to keep something like a limited edition toy in its packaging or box instead of fulfilling its duty as a toy. It’s silly, of course.

So I do solemnly declare that on this night, I will do my utmost to never feel bored when “I have nothing to play” and three games to play with great reviews! I shall play them as they deserve to be played and enjoy them as they should be enjoyed! I will revel in the art, characters and plot of each dusty game in my Steam Library! Huzzah!

Or I can spend more time casually playing terrible Dota 2.