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!
Reading the comments - am I the weird one for just remembering?
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).
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!
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.
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.
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?
I don’t, my favorite games have a way of leaping out of my memory or my life and latching onto my face to remind me I love them. I guess I forget the others.
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’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.
Some people use categories in their steam library, but it would be nice to have something else to track it all.
Yeah i have 4 categories in steam
- Beaten - games I have completed
- want to complete - my real backlog
- can never complete - for games that don’t have a real end like mmos or multi-player only games.
- Dead Games - for games that no longer work anymore because the publisher shut down the servers. This is a reminder to not buy these kind of games in the future.
I also add non steam games like Playstation and Switch games as shortcuts to a desktop files named after the game that point to nothing. Then add it to the categories to track.
I like the shortcuts workaround!
This would be a nice solution if my games was only on steam, however i also use GOG quite a lot. So yeah as u say a more dedicated solution would be nice.
I find this post interesting. Are you asking because you’re curious about statistical information like “you played this game 28 hours more than that game” or just so you remember if you liked a game or not?
I understand the first one, but I can’t even comprehend the second. As soon as I see a screenshot from a game, my brain goes back to playing it and the general emotions it triggers. I might not remember the details about the game, but I’ll remember if it was fun, frustrating, boring etc. So I think it’s really strange that someone could completely forget playing a game.
I don’t mean any offense or anything. I know I’m some kind of neurodivergent, and I find the differences in how we each think very interesting.
https://www.backloggery.com/ might be the least modern looking game tracking site, but it’s the only one I found which gives you a yearly breakdown of your started and beat games, that’s way I use it.
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.
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 have all games I have completed on Steam in Hidden, all games I‘ve never played in its own list and all games I have started in its own list. If I start a game I move it from one list to the other and same when I‘ve finished one. Only works for Steam stuff obviously. But I play 95% of my stuff there so that‘s good enough for me.
I keep a list in a plain text file. It has sections for each year and one section for games I’m interested in. The list used to be on paper and I’m considering going back to that.
I game exclusively in Linux (and I play on GOG and Itch), so I just use Lutris categories for this. Of course, I made a Lutris account and turned on sync
I just started a checklist in Joplin, gonna make a new list for each year.
Like goodreads but for games? Name it goodplays maybe?
