VGCollect Forum
General and Gaming => General => Topic started by: dhaabi on January 19, 2026, 11:07:41 am
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For the majority of us here, we have gaming backlogs that seem like they never shorten but instead only increase in size. So, how long is your backlog, and how much time do you project it will realistically take you to complete it should no new titles were to be added to it?
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Never. And I'm 100% okay with that.
I constantly add games to the backlog and replay games I've already beat. Even if I live for another 40 years and am able to beat 60 games on average a year (40 x 60 = 2400 games beat), I'll still have games I've yet to play. However, I don't see this as some sort of failure or act of futility, but rather an opportunity to play as many games as I can in my relatively short time on this planet. Even if there are games I never get to, I'd rather think of all the ones I did play, good or bad. Obviously, I prioritize games that I think I'll like more or ones that are widely considered good games. I've also become more okay with dropping a game if I don't like it, especially if it's a longer game (10+ hours). If I do live to be 80, I hope i get to look back and smile at all the amazing gaming experiences I had throughout my life.
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While I have a bazillion games in libraries thanks to freebies, I actually don't have tons of actual, genuine, backlog lol I'd be surprised if I have more than like 20 games at most that I'd want to actually play that I haven't gotten to yet.
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I just look at my back log like my retirement reward. When we get to a certain age, we won't want to leave the house as much, and god damn those video games will be delightful :D
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I think it will. Historically speaking, the untouched games eventually get played or they get traded in because I lose interest and/or my taste changes.
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I just look at my back log like my retirement reward. When we get to a certain age, we won't want to leave the house as much, and god damn those video games will be delightful :D
With all do respect, why not start playing them now? Obviously everyone's situation is going to be different (work, kids, and other responsibilities obviously play a factor), but there there is no guarantee of tomorrow or that you'll ever reach retirement, either due to death or other unforeseen life circumstances. Why not just jump into the backlog now? At least that's how I look at it. I definitely don't want to wait until I'm old and possible unable to play games for one reason or another to really tackle my backlog. I want to do it now while I'm still able to.
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I just look at my back log like my retirement reward. When we get to a certain age, we won't want to leave the house as much, and god damn those video games will be delightful :D
With all do respect, why not start playing them now? Obviously everyone's situation is going to be different (work, kids, and other responsibilities obviously play a factor), but there there is no guarantee of tomorrow or that you'll ever reach retirement, either due to death or other unforeseen life circumstances. Why not just jump into the backlog now? At least that's how I look at it. I definitely don't want to wait until I'm old and possible unable to play games for one reason or another to really tackle my backlog. I want to do it now while I'm still able to.
Yep. That's why I'm starting to delve in now, because I'm done collecting at this point which frees up a lot of mental-bandwidth and the games on my shelf are looking more appealing to me than ever before, now that I'm not preoccupied with thinking about getting more all of the time.... I spent a lot of time building this thing up, and like you said, tomorrow is not a guarantee. You have to take the opportunity that today gives you to enjoy your time on Earth. Always forget what the saying is... life is what happens, while we're busy making other plans?
It's time to bust those games out.
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For myself at this moment, I have logged exactly 400 games as part of my ongoing backlog. Of course, I'll play games not backlogged, the backlog will grow in size, and certain games will eventually retire from my backlog without ever having being played in the years to come. In practice, my backlog will almost certainly never be complete so long as my interest in the hobby remains. However, the question I proposed in the opening post—how long do you project for you to complete your current backlog at its current state with no new titles being added to it—is what I'm most curious about.
When thinking about that focused question, it's obviously difficult to come up with an idea since my personal backlog is so large. But were I to only play games from my backlog while maintaining the rate of play I've had these past few years, I imagine it to be around fifteen years at least. Based on numbers, that's nearly a halved rate of completion that I've been steadying, but a sizable part of my backlog includes games with lengthy completion times. Of course, I tend to play through games slowly while wanting to engage in as much of their content that I'm interested in should the effort and time to do so feels balanced, so it may take even longer.
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A year ago I would have said 50 years or something. Partly because I had found that a lot of the games I had I didn't actually care for enough to play. The 52 Games challenge helped with that. It helped me go through and actually play stuff I owned and many types of games I used to like I had outgrown. Entire genres became dead to me, such as platformers and especially 3D platformers.
Now I will say never but that is because life and lifestyle changes brought me to a point where I'm not interested in playing games. The interest isn't actually gone, but the priority for them is way down. I've only played 3 games in the past 6 months: MLM, Dropsum v2 and Diablo 3 (only in the past couple weeks sporatically). All of which are "endless" so they have no ability to progress through anything.
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Entire genres became dead to me
This has been a harsh realization for me as well. While I wouldn't say any genre is 100%, absolutely dead to me, there are a few that I enjoy significantly less compared to 15+ years ago. JRPGs specifically have really taking a downward slide when it comes to my enjoyment of them. It's a genre I want to love again just as much as I did in the 2000s and early 2010s, but I just can't bring myself to get into the vast majority of them. To a lessor extent, I've been finding I'm not as big on RTS games as I used to be. Every time I've gone back and tried replaying an old Westwood Studios RTS game and various others I just get bored or overly frustrated.
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I hope to have mine finished in the next 4-6 years. Finally setting a hard limit on my 8th-gen wish list and the steadily dwindling number of new games I actually want to play will be a big help in getting caught up. The bulk of my backlog is in 8th-gen games, with the PS4 (my largest collection with over 200 games once I complete it) making up the largest percentage. On some consoles like the Switch, my backlog is nearly nonexistent due to buying so few games for the platform and generally playing them through as soon as I get them. I don't even consider myself as collecting for the PS5, for which I'll probably never have more than 40 games. There just aren't very many new games that actually appeal to me. As far as 7th-gen and earlier, my collections are basically finished so I'm more focused on digitizing them so those games will outlive their original hardware and be more convenient to play.
I've deliberately kept my collection small over the years because I didn't want a massive backlog or to waste time playing games I didn't really care about. I remember about 6-7 years ago looking at my TV setup with 6 consoles, realizing that it wasn't even half of the consoles I owned, and concluding that I needed to curb my "plastic addiction." I actually got out of the hobby for about 3 years where I hardly bought anything, but eventually recovered from burnout because there was still stuff I wanted to play that I didn't own.
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For games that I already own based on HowLongToBeat Main+Extras median time, my backlog is a little over 3841 hours. At my peak of the hobby, I've played about 500 hours a year. Nowdays, it's around 100. If I don't buy anything new I still have enough games to play for the rest of my life.
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My backlog grows faster than I can play. It's like a Hydra. Finish one, three more appear. If I stopped buying games today, maybe 3-4 years?
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My backlog is currently 1,010 games. Id say short games are 5 hours and long ones are 40 hours. Id give that a 20 hour liberal average because I tend to savor games and play slow and I have a ton of story driven rpg games in that backlog. So that is
20,200 hours
Or roughly 846.2 entire days or 2.3 entire years without break or sleep.
Now in all seriously I doubt ill ever be able to allocate over 6 hours per day max to games and that is heavy side. Id say closer to 3.5 average. So that is about 1,277 hours per year. I'll give it 2000 to be generous and make the math easier.
Thatd be 10 or so whole years to finish the backlog with no breaks, no other media, and no missing days.
Then I add games all the time.
So id say the general answer to the question is
NEVER lol.
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Never…
I have a lot of games. I keep buying games.
I play the same games over and over.
I never get to the new games.
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For me it's entirely up to how you define "backlog" I guess.
If it's just games I've bought and haven't played, I could realistically do it in a couple years. It's somewhere between 100-200 games and I generally play between 30-50 games a year (depending on the games I play. If it's lots of RPG's that number is closer to 30). My collection is actually not as massive as it once was cause I purged a good 50% of it like 7 or 8 years ago. I went from just collecting everything that looked interesting and putting it on my shelf to creating a highly curated collection featuring only my top 50 games on each system. So I've actually beaten a good 90% of the games in my collection, with most of the unfinished ones being games I picked up in bundles on Steam.
But if you broaden the definition to just "any game I want to play but haven't", it will take much, much longer. I am constantly looking for new games to add to my collection. It's really fun for me to find a game that makes me rethink my collection. Like "if I add this to my collection, what will I take out". On top of that there are systems I haven't really collected at all yet like the Famicom and Super Famicom, So I'll probably have to play through 100+ games before I can settle on my top 50 I actually add to my collection.