Hiya, just newly thought about something: wouldn’t be nice if there was a simple way of checking what games you have played over the years, a way to keep track of wether you liked the game or not, how much time you spent playing it etc… Currently, personally i only check steam library for those kinda details. But it would be nice if there was a more dedicated solution for it, like a selfhosted app or something along those lines.
I’m not well educated regarding this so if there are any current solutions for this then please let me know, and let me know if you yourself have a special kind of system for this!
have a great rest of your weekend!
I’ve been using obsidian notes for a lot of things. I have a kanban board there that goes buy->bought->in progress->finished->100%
The last step is pretty useless because I never even want to 100% a game. I should remove it. The main use for the board is so when I haven’t played anything in a long time, I can look and go “oh, I had that one going” and pick it up instead of starting some other new game.
Yeah, I think I’ll remove the 100% from mine too, it’s been a while since the last time I did it and at one point I stopped enjoying doing it
Not a complete list, but I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the games I bought but then never or barely played to try to get me to revisit them in some organized way. Outside of that, there’s just the steam library. Anything further back from my time playing on consoles is kind of just lost to time and memory unless it was a particularly memorable game.
I use backloggery.com, but I see a lot of people using backloggd.com these days. Backloggery is a bit more old school and relies a lot on manual entry, so I’m sure some of its competitors are better about linking up to things like your Steam account. You can also track a lot of this stuff on HowLongToBeat.com, which is mostly seeking to answer the question in the URL but also lets you log a review of the game, etc.
Backloggd works great for me because I want both game/library tracking and user reviews, including my own once I finish a game. If someone only cares about the former, backloggery.com is probably just as good.
Helps me keep track of which games I’ve played and which games I own on which platform to avoid double-buying.
Steam is where almost all my games are and i’ll have it sorted into a Not Played, Playing, Completed, and 100% category. Recently i’ve started trying to look into NeoDB though for things i can’t add to steam (Like PS3 games)
I’ve only played one game since 2005.
Reading the comments - am I the weird one for just remembering?
Must be nice to have a functioning memory like this
The tradeoff is that I’m terrible at time. Anything beyond about ten days in the future is almost meaningless to me.
Hmm… for me, it’s less about memory and more about helping myself see a pattern of what I like and what I don’t, which eventually helps me make better purchasing decisions.
Like, when I look at a list of my favorite games, I can conclusively tell you: I like challenging, replayable games with real-time action, synergy among their mechanics, and mechanical variety.
For me, this knowledge would not have been attainable if I didn’t sit down and put together a list of what I like/what I don’t like.
Me too, but I don’t really play a lot of video games, so I could list every game I’ve ever played pretty quickly.
If by remembering you mean “I use no tools to keep track of games I’ve played and make no special effort at remembering, either I do or I don’t”, then same. But also in the last few years I’ve been playing a lot less games than I used to (and I didn’t really play that many to start with).
Look at you just raw dogging your steam library.
You probably have different gaming habits than me, or a hell of a memory. I’ve likely played over 4 thousand different games over the course of my life so far.
… Now I want to use one of those tools to try to figure out this number.
I can definitely see the appeal of being able to do stuff with the information, and I doubt I could sit down and make a list of every game I’ve ever played. However my memory is pretty good for this sort of thing. It’s very rare for me to lose objects as I have a database-like memory for that stuff.
Amusingly this means that if someone else moves things then I’m comedically awful at searching for whatever it was, and if I move house or re-organise then it takes me a few weeks for my brain to record all the new data. Until then I’m a clueless idiot.
Oh and as I said in another comment - time is my nemesis. I often don’t know what day of the week it is and anything beyond about a week and a half into the future has almost no meaning to me. It’s not a very useful trade-off!
I have definitely not played 4,000 games. I tend to stick on a few games till I beat them and then I move on, sometimes returning to replay. I don’t have an astounding memory, but if a game is mentioned I’ll remember if I played it or not and that is good enough for me. If I forget a good experience, well, that’s another opportunity to have it for the “first time”, a la that old tumblr post about wanting to be able to selectively erase your memory so you could re-experience your favorite book for the first time.
No. I remember all the games I’ve played. I can’t list them all, however if you were to ask me “hey have you ever played xyz”, I would remember if I had or not.
Well, the point of such an app would be to have them listed I would guess.
Yes. I was just responding to the comment asking if he/she was the only one who remembers if they’ve played a game.
If I remember it then it was good enough to remember
I don’t. If I played a game and then forgot about it, then i get to play it again at a different stage in life. It’s a whole new experience! Why would I want to miss out on that?
There is nothing to miss out on by just keeping a list of which games you have played and when. It’s just an extra step after finishing playing a game.
Does steam recording the last launch date of a game ruin your next experience with a game for you ?
At the end of the year I look at the Steam Year in Review overview.
Obsidian is my main notetaking app, so I use the kanban plugin to keep a list of games I’m playing, plan to play, and finished.
On Steam I have categories for played, unplayed, playing, and never touching again. Works well, but that backlog is brutal.
I hear you and if you keep up with the free games from gog epic and prime gaming giveaways. It never stops growing.
I do the organizing with categories/tags in game libraries that supports it; want to play, playing, beaten, given up, unbeatable.
I also have something similar in Playnite, though I don’t love that program.
I also love notebooks, I keep a notebook around for writing in during games, and I set up lists for each year with a column for bought games and one for played games. With this I can see what games I have played since 2016/17 or thereabout.
I love statistics, and seeing when and for how long I played a game is fun.
I’ve been using backloggery.com for more than 15 years.
It’s a simple, manual site, but I think that’s also its main strenght - I’ve had too many issues with other sites where I wanted to add a niche game I played but it was not in their databases, inconsistent naming between games in the same series, no ability to add duplicates when I occasionally double-diped on a game and so on.
It has all features I need - you can add reviews, notes, track priorities, wishlist, borrowed games, make custom lists, get stats… it’s also community supported with no ads.
The site was a bit stale without development for a while, but Drumble (the owner) finished a major rewrite last year and started developing new features again. You can check his profile here for an example.
I use bgstats.
