I dislike “spend money to save money” logic, but I’m gonna be honest, the Steam Deck was really transformative to me in that regard.

The fact games suspend and come back immediately, and that I can carry it to bed, to the sofa with my wife, and so on, means I actually finish games. Hell, sometimes I’ll be watching TV and playing at the same time, but the game does get played. It’s a backlog destroyer.

Hey so like, I made it through the character creator on Baldur’s Gate 3 last night and I consider that an achievement

That’s why I set a rule to myself to not buy new games until I complete the ones I currently have.

I rarely buy from steam anymore… I just let my humble bundle subscription give me all the steam games I’ll never play.

I’ve bought maybe 40 new games since I got my Steam Deck a year ago. I’ve played maybe a dozen of those, and only played two of them to completion.

I had to start with the Witcher 3, which is finished the main story for but never got around to the DLCs (because my parenting instincts are apparently so bad I got the worst ending possible on my first playthrough, which kind of soured playing any further).

Then I had to play the Mass Effect trilogy, because the Legendary Edition had just dropped and it had been so long.

Then I discovered Horizon Zero Dawn, and couldn’t put it down.

Ever since then I’ve been bouncing back and forth between games and franchises I simply never got around to in my teens and 20s — Assassin’s Creed, the Arkham series, Bioshock, Dishonored, Halo (God bless the Master Chief Collection) Kingdoms of Amalur, Portal (duh), Prince of Persia…

I’m slowly getting caught up on not just my Steam backlog, but 15 years worth of gaming I missed out on because I didn’t have the money.