I'm currently in the planning stages of a fairly big update to my game room, and part of that is estimating how big my PS4 collection is going to become. I'm leaving both the Switch and XBONE out of this equations because while these two consoles have several games I really want to own and play, the Switch is still too early in its life for me to have an accurate assessment of how many games for it I may want to own someday, and the XBONE will be lucky if more than 20 games for it sound appealing enough to me to buy. The PS4 on the other hand is already a massive collection for me and there are so, so, so many games for it that I still want to own and play. On top of that Sony has been my default place for multiplats since the PS2, unless of course there is a compelling reason to buy a multiplat on another console.
But so far I have been going through every North American released PS4 game and even though I'm only up to I in the alphabet, there are already nearly a hundred more games I'd still like to own for it. One thing that blows me away is how many titles for it I've never heard of or seen, many of which are either Indie games or Indie games released by LRG and its ilk of small physical print run online stores. It really makes the PS4 a very interesting and almost enigmatic system for collecting since there have been so many games that never saw a widespread releases, and that most people who own the console will never hear about or see.
Despite finding the PS4's library fascinating, it's taken me a really, really long time to go through all of it as is given just how many games are on the system. At this rate it'll probably take me until week's end to finish doing this, but already its looking like I'm going to need a much bigger shelf in my game room which I'm going to have to wedge in somehow. But I'll hold off on planning that until I'm done going through the PS4s library of games.
Well holy poo...
I just finished going through the entire PS4 library as it stands right now and my wishlist is at 290 games! I knew that this wishlist would be insane when I hadn't even got halfway through the alphabet and I was already at 100 games. What's funny is that prior to doing this I thought I knew the PS4s library pretty well, but I'd say at least half the games I added to my list I knew literally nothing about, and many of those I didn't even know existed. The PS4 might have the most interesting, complex library of games since the days of unlicensed NES games. I am truly impressed.
What's even more crazy is that someday, assuming nothing ever happens to my collection, the PS4 will likely overtake my PS2 collection as my largest console library. I currently have 381 PS2 games with about 35 PS2 games I'm still on the hunt for, meaning that someday I should be over 400 games for that console. Compare that to my PS4 collection which currently stands at 128 games with the 290 games I'm after and you can see why it will someday challenge its size. That's not even mentioning that the PS4 is still getting regular releases and probably will at least for the next 2-years until the PS5 starts coming into its own. Considering this I have little doubt that someday, probably years from now, my PS4 collection will overtake my PS2 collection.
This certainly also gives me a solid idea of what I'm going to have to do in order to accommodate a collection of this size. I am likely going to order another of the really large Atlantic 1080 CD media shelves that I currently use for my PS2 collection. Since it will be a while before the PS4 collection will need this shelf to itself, I am going to actually transplant my PS1 collection to it as well, and use my current PS1 shelf which hold about 450 CDs to hold my growing Saturn collection. What's funny is I assumed before going through the PS4 library that it would indefinitely share the same shelf with the PS1 collection, thinking there couldn't more than 150 PS4 games that I'd still want to get. How wrong I was lol. Sadly this is probably the last expansion I'm going to be able to do with my current game room at least until I movie into a place with a larger room that I can turn into my game room. I rent part of a house and have two bedrooms at my disposal, one of which is my game room. It is already jam packed with shelves, games, boxes and figures, and shoehorning one more shelf is going to take some creativity and skill. I'm confident that it can be done, however I'm fairly certain that if I run out of room again it'll take either moving to a bigger place or starting to box stuff up in order to have enough room for everything, the latter which I'd prefer to avoid.
One last thing is I hope I have the same luck in tracking PS4 games down that I had with the PS2 and original XBOX. Most of my PS2 and XBOX collection came from a store called Tradesmart which was owned by the now defunct Go Hastings corporation that went belly up back in 2016. They used to sell anything that was older than PS3/360/Wii for only $3 a pop regardless of title. Obviously this resulted in a lot of competition with other collectors and resellers, however my biggest issue towards the end was the employees of that store who'd snipe almost anything that went for over $15 on ebay. However, for a few years that place was a goldmine and roughly 70% of my PS2 collection came from there, and probably 90% of my original XBOX collection. I suppose PAWN shops will be my best bet on a lot of these in terms of getting them cheap, however I'm probably going to have to utilize Gamestop and ebay a fair bit since many of these titles are obscure af. And of course there are the 56 Limited Run, Special Reserve and other limited online only titles that I'm going to have to get using ebay. Luckily most of these titles seem to go for what they retailed at originally, with only a few fetching a much higher, inflated price.
I'm looking forward to this new collecting journey that will be more of a marathon rather than a sprint.
