The Steam Meta Game (AKA buying games to never play them)

yes

Quite guilty of this but I've recently tried to stop doing it by telling myself "if you're going to buy the bundle to get cards to buy games for "free", then just buy the game."

A friend told me that deal finding and buying games is my addiction. Somewhat true.

Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards @ Get steam games for close to 0 cost @ sell cards

Thousands of games

Out of all my games i only regret 3-4 and then i have a few i just haven't got the time to play yet but i paid verry little for so no real loss.

For me I just see a game that interests me and I buy it and play it till the next game that interests me pops up, I've prob only completed fully, about 20 games in the last 5 years.

It's a vicious cycle.

I have only a few games on steam, even so I haven't played most of them, the one played for up to 3-7 hours usually just for cards.
That's my backlog games.

Im playing or plan to play about 75% of my games. 25% are left overs from bundle that i add to my acc for cards/achievements/collection purposes.

most of us will stop when it's over 9000!

until then i guess we are doomed.

I think I have collection-addiction. Even if I know a certain game is not good and I would never play it, if they make XXXXX collection complete, I tend to purchase/trade that game. What a shame...

So I call it "Steam-Online"

I kind of hate the game, but I keep playing anyway.

On an SG note, it's disheartening when you gift a AAA game and they never play it.

It's like a drug. I want to stop, but I no longer can.

I think a big part of it is bundles, I usually buy bundles for one or two games and the rest is junk in my mind since the price of the bundle is usually less than the price of buying 2 games in that bundle. I will play every game I've bought on its own but I couldn't care less about most of the crap I get in bundles so I'll just farm their cards and hide them in my library. I have a lot of games in my library but I'm by no means a collector.

In my case I don't play the majority of my games because I got them for free.
I mean, like 20% were really free for a short period of time, the other 80% I have I made it by trading stuff.
I just buy from resellers or when people quicksells some games so I can play them, or get some cards.
I usually play some couple games for a loooong time, and others only for some time and stop.

I've been a collector all my life and games is my newest thing to collect, that's all :D. Started with Pokemon cards when I was 6 and from there I did movies, books and coins plus a few smaller collections that never stuck.

I do plan on playing all, if not most, of my games one day :).

I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was. To play them is my real test, to buy them is my cause.

i currently have 1445 games in my Steam account and there are a significant number i will never play. for a while i was kinda addicted to buying bundles so that accounts for the amount of games i have but i dont do that anymore, i have now (mostly) gone back to only buying games i intend to play. having said that i have bought a lot of games i intended to play only to discover i didnt like them or couldnt get into them when i tried them out or something better came along and i gave up. over the past year the amount of games i bought has dropped significantly and i dont expect that to change in the future. think i may be coming to the end of my gaming life?

I got caught up in buying bundles tbh, I was an idiot, I enjoyed the collecting part but looking back, I should have just bought games and bundles that I would actually play.

I have almost 1500 games.. but most of them I personaly never play. In my young days, I play a lots cracked games downloaded from net. Firstly, I wana somewhat return to developers.
Second - I wanna be a developer, so something like respect to others
Third - Hope.. like me, there are people, who buy games, there is a chance my games wont be forgotten.
Fourth - I share my games with friends a family
Fifth - In worst case, I can sell my account for money

(sorry for my bad english)

It would be several reasons.

1. Collecting stuff is always fun.
2. Card selling is a way to get money and buy other games.
3. Knowing what kind of games you like, helps to pass time, in times you like to play them. I do like Point to Click and VN, but there is not always the mood for such. So at times when I play them like an addicted, I am just happy to have plenty to play and choose from. Same goes for different types like RPG Maker style games and other genres.
4. Getting a lot of different games and new genres always opens up new options... I never thought I would play Pizza Express that long and I am still at it. Sparkle Evo 2 was a surprisingly fun game, too. So there are plenty I would have never bought in the first place.
5. Sentimental reason as well. I am really happy to have back my Wacky Wheels and Raptor game played them when I was young.
6. Getting the games into steam you have, but can't add. ( got about another 3k games as hardcopy starting at 5 1/4 floppy disks that won't be able to get activated there and playing the disk juggler is no more fun in this era)
7. One main point that keeps me going, is the hope to find a game, which keeps and moves me like games in the old days. Day of the Tentacle, Dreamweb, Diablo 2, Final Fantasy 7, Settlers 1 - or even older Sorcery on the Schneider CPC, Bomberman on the SNES. Still playing those over and over again. RPG-wise I am still looking for something that offers the same potential, that Ultima Online once did, but since I have been on both sides, player and admin script /build team it's hard to play somewhere and something else, when you know how different and much more joy there could be. Looking at the current state the games are released on steam and overall, I doubt that will happen any soon. Performance issues, bugs, half hearted/ finished games or those basic asset games that lack any content - I wouldn't even mind playing basic free asset games, if the story around it would be half decent.

when i started collecting games it started as a bet (this was the summer of 2014) the bet was between me and a friend, it was about who could reach 100 games first.
not really sure what happened after that ._. all i know is that i didn't stop at 100...
that was also around the same time i started collecting badges, something that has escalated a bit over time as well <.<

I don't do it for trading.

Cards play a part. I've been known to buy every game that costs under £1 and has cards during a sale before. It was probably less games than you might think as many around that price-point have been in bundle anyway. Don't do it to that degree now, but still buy the odd game like that if it has positive reviews. Thing is, I'm not too clever at making the cards drop as I'm too lazy but I've been doing better thanks to IdleMaster lately. At one point I had over 1000 games with cards to drop, now it's somewhere in the 700s.

The cheapness of games because of Steam and digital distribution in general is somewhat still surprising to me and that plays a fairly big role. I'm in my 30s and skipped gaming for most of my 20s (roughly the first decade of this century). When I was gaming in my teens I was a console player and nearly all the games cost £40 each. When I was very young I remember games on cassette for £0.99-£2.99, that sort of price range. I still find it somewhat amazing that you can get games for the same sort of price that they cost 30 years ago on Steam or in bundles and so much cheaper than they were when I was used to games costing in my teens. I'm now an adult with my own money and it seems like very little to pay a lot fo the time. There's a lot of crap in there, but there's some nice hidden gems knocking around, especially at sale time, and as I skipped a lot fo the early 2000s, there's many classics I never played. E.G. I get back into gaming, I'm on Steam and I hear how Half-Life is regarded as pretty much an all-time classic game and see that it costs £2-£3 on sale and there's no way I can resist something like that. For something a bit more contemporary, Skyrim goes for £2.49 - so many hundreds of hours of potential entertainment for such a cheap price, that's just great to me. I almost completely shy away from full-priced AAA games, btw, as there's no need with so many inexpensive games out there.

Steamgifts being a thing is part of it. Can justify buying bundles if I don't have one of the games, telling myself I can make people happy with the spares. A bit like the cards though, I'm bad at keeping on top of that and have accumulated way too many spare keys.

I like choice. Actually, I waiver on that as sometimes I think I like the idea of choice more than choice itself, especially if I catch myself playing the same few games for a while and not exploring my library as much as I could. Still, as a general concept it's appealing to me.

There's a collecting element about it as well, which overlaps the price thing a lot, plus the choice thing. I can "pick up a new piece for my collection" for very little, particularly in bundles where you can get 2-6 items for $1 etc.