Video games are an expensive hobby. Most games range from $40 to $60, depending on the system, the age of the game, and even the rarity of the game. So how do I have a collection of 100+ games that I've accumulated over the last three years? I'm an unemployed college student, so it's not like I can afford $4,000 worth of games.
Steam Sales.
When I started my Steam account, it was because I wanted to play "Portal 2" and I liked computer games. For several years, my Steam library contained "Portal 2," eventually joined by "Portal." And then I got a credit card and was able to start using it to make online purchases.
My purchases started off small. A game here and there was all I bought for a couple months. Then I saw something beautiful and magical: my first Steam sale. Now, I'm behind on a lot of games and over the last couple of years games have been moving to PC just because of Steam and the market there.
My first batches of games were ones that I wanted to play, that I intended to play as soon as possible. And I did exactly what I did with the games that I owned for console. I played through them for a good long while, got distracted, and moved onto a new game. I didn't feel too bad about it as I continued to circle around and play through the games that I bought.
The downfall began once I continued to buy games. I bought all sorts of games; ones that looked sort of interesting, ones that had been recommended to me once, ones I thought one day I might eventually play for maybe 20 minutes before putting it away.
Steam makes it so easy to just sit down and buy all the games and all of the DLC that comes with them. They've continued to hold more and more sales, smaller ones that entice me to buy three or four games at a time. I've slowed down in the last couple of months just because I realize that most of the games I'm purchasing now aren't games that I'm realistically going to get to in the next three years. I'm still chipping away at "Skyrim," after all.
The danger only gets worse when you count in Humble Bundle. It's a good website supporting good causes and making it easy to buy about seven games, just to get the one game you really want. I will not lie, I bought a bundle of games on there a while ago that were all cat-themed games. Most of them are silly games that I played for 10 minutes and then never played again. There's a couple I've played for 20 hours over about a year.
Is it bad that I've amassed a digital collection of over 100 games? Is it bad that I have an insane number of physical games as well? I love my games and I like having so much to choose from, even when I go back to playing the same three games over and over. So for me, it's a frustrating blessing. For someone else, it might be a curse of wanting to get all the achievements of all of those games.
But we're living in an age of entertainment, and it's sometimes great to have all of those games to play and tell your friends about. At least you'll sound like a much more hardcore gamer than other people.
