I did not think this post would take this long for me to release, but when you are in a groove, you do some next level research no one asked you to do.
Like any good journey, you need to know where you are going and the route that you want to take. I decided to reevaluate my collection to see exactly how many games I own in my personal collection and how far I have left to go in this never ending quest. I hope you like charts, numbers, and statistics as much as I do, because we are going deep into my current collection.
As of October 22, 2019, this is where my current collection stands:
Nintendo 64: 13
Nintendo Gamecube: 50
Nintendo Wii: 35
Nintendo Wii Virtual Console: 5
Nintendo Wii U: 4
Nintendo Switch: 45
PlayStation: 6
PlayStation 2: 29
PlayStation 3: 37
PlayStation 3 Virtual Console: 10
PlayStation 4: 44
Xbox 360: 19
Nintendo GameBoy: 2
Nintendo GameBoy Color: 3
Nintendo GameBoy Advance: 21
Nintendo DS: 42
Nintendo 3DS: 56
Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console: 15
PlayStation Portable: 12
PlayStation Vita: 14
PlayStation Vita Virtual Console: 3
PC: 152
Super Nintendo Classic: 21
Grand Total: 638
Right off the back, most of my collection (minus PC) have less than 50 games in total. I have included all virtual console games that I have bought and the games included in the SNES Classic since they are licensed games that I paid for. I did not include, however, games that I played through a subscription service like PlayStation Now or the Switch Online Service, since I do not personally own them. Finishing any of the games on the subscription service does not count toward my overall finish rate. There are other games I could claim that my brother has, most noted all of our Super Nintendo games, but he is the keeper of those and I would not take those from him.
The hardest thing I had to consider, and remember, were games packed in a compilation. I took it upon myself to include each individual game as its own entry since it is the full game; just packaged and jammed in a single card or disc. This is why my GameCube count is high despite me not having a lot on the shelves.
The funny thing about this list is the number of PC games that I own. I did not own a functioning gaming PC until the summer of 2015, and somehow was able to amass the most games for it. I blame our savings savior Gabe Newell for this particularly. When I got my gaming PC, it was the one thing I had that could play all the new releases on the PS4 and Xbox One at the time. The latest system I had at the time was a PS3, but new releases that I wanted to play were no longer coming out for the system. With most of my purchases coming from Steam sales and free games from bundles, my PC collection became out of control to the point where I have to stop buying games that go on sale.
Next, I want to break down the number of games that I have finished on each system and compare them to the number I have not finished or have yet to touch yet. Here is the breakdown:
As you can no doubt tell, I have a problem with finishing games, unless it is a Gameboy game. When I look at the data, it makes me wonder a bit why I leave a lot of these games unfinished. Out of the 23 systems that I have, only 6 of them have a higher finish percentage and 2 of them are at a hundred percent finish. 14 have a higher percentage of “Not Finished” and the other 4 have a higher percentage of my haven’t touched the games I’ve bought. Those numbers are shocking, but something that I was not aware of. This whole ordeal was to find a way to motivate and finish them all.
The only system I can understand with the low clear rate is the PS3. I unfortunately had my hard drive die on me and it took all of my precious game data along with it; forcing me to restart every game that I owned up to that point. Some consoles like the original PlayStation and the Xbox 360 have low numbers because 1) most games I wanted to play on the original I bought digitally off the PlayStation network for my PS3, and 2) I bought my Xbox from one of my roommates just so I could play Tales of Vesperia and nothing else. When browsing the system one day I discovered a bunch of downloaded games on the system and to this day keep forgetting that they are there. The 360 may be one of the last consoles I get to on my backlog, but I have good games for it like Lost Odyssey and Culdcept Saga.
So what do I do now with the rest of this info? Well for starters, I now have nifty graphs that I can see fluctuate whenever things change (yay). If I can incorporate a widget to a page on my blog to have accurate, real-time updates, that would be cool to have. I had to force myself to stop at this point because I wanted to dive deeper by breaking down the different genres, the time it would take for me to finish everything if I had the nonstop time, and list out the games that I am close to finish versus the ones I’m still early in, but then I would never get a post out. Plus, at the time of writing this, my wife mentioned why I did not opt to evaluate our combined gaming collection, which adds around 200 more games and then updating her list to make sure that it is accurate.
I love collecting data and doing statistics, but there is always a limit in a span of time….
Let me know what you think. Would you be interested in me diving deeper collecting data on my personal collection? Do you think my numbers are amateur-level and I need to pump those numbers up? How long do you think it will take me to finish a game in the Wii U category since it is the only system I have not finished a game under? Let me hear you thoughts in the comments below.
Just because we are out of Summer does not mean to stay less hydrated.
DanamesX
Tales From The Backlog 