At the risk of sounding like some old grandma on the back porch in her rocking chair, lecturing the young ‘uns, I was lucky to get one new game a year when I was a kid. There were far fewer games released back then, and they were always a luxury spend, usually a birthday or Christmas gift from my parents. Digital downloads didn’t exist, so you had to save up for a shiny physical copy or beg, borrow, or steal from your mates. We played far fewer games, but we played those we did have to death as a result.

These days, I am well aware that every year that passes adds to my already extensive backlog of games that I want to play. Steam alone was home to over 20,000 new games last year, and while it’s great to have such a variety and be utterly spoiled for choice, both my wallet and very limited free time feel the pinch. My backlog feels like a burden, and it’s not getting better any time soon. I still have Xbox 360 games sealed in cellophane that I planned to play when I bought them… many years ago.

How I Calculated My Gaming Backlog

Knowing I’m not alone in this struggle, have you ever wondered just how much playtime is gathering dust on your shelves? I decided to find out. I accounted for every game that I own, physical and digital, that I could feasibly pick up and play at a moment’s notice, and then added up their average playtime using howlongtobeat.com.

That means older handhelds like 3DS and PSP games are viable, as I still have the consoles to hand (and even replaced my bloated PSP battery a couple of years ago), and my Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are still plugged in and ready to go. However, anything for the Wii, Wii U, or older platforms like PlayStation 2 is excluded, as I don’t have any of those set up right now. For clarity, I do have plenty of older games I always meant to play, but I wanted to be realistic.

The result? I’ve got 1,880 hours in my backlog. And that’s a conservative estimate.

I didn’t include any games that I have started playing, even if I’ve only invested a few hours. That shaved off quite a large chunk of my gaming backlog, but I needed to draw the line somewhere.

That’s also only factoring in the average playtime of all the games; I could spend far longer on many of them depending on how much side content there is. I also only chose games I already own, and really, there are many, many other games that I want to or plan to play, but I learned a long time ago that there’s no point in me buying every game at launch when I might not play it anytime soon. I might as well wait for a sale and get it much cheaper.

Believe it or not, once I had whittled out older games and those I’d played a little of, my backlog was not as extensive as I had imagined it would be. It still resulted in a total playtime I feel like I will never truly clear.

Over A Year’s Worth Of Playtime

So just how long would it take me to clear my gaming backlog? If I were very optimistic about the time I could commit, averaging three hours each weekday evening, and six hours both Saturday and Sunday, that would be 27 hours of gaming a week. At that rate, it would take me over a year to clear my backlog.

It’s an unrealistic estimate, of course. I can’t commit that much time every week without fail, and it doesn’t account for all the new games released during that time that I’d inevitably pick up and play for work or fun that would take away some of that time, or the ones that would get thrown on the heap and join the backlog.

I don’t even remember the last time I actually picked up a game from my gaming backlog to tackle it. I fear it’s inevitable that I will never actually play all the games I had planned to experience. If there is ever some sort of apocalypse, though, I’ll have plenty to keep me entertained for a good long while. As long as I have electricity, that is.

I did all this math, but was it worth it? Is it going to make me work through that backlog more than I was previously? Realistically, my time is always going to get eaten up between the same few things: work, family, events, and those evenings where I just want to quietly while away the hours doing nothing in particular. Also, Final Fantasy 14. That’s just a constant.

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However, I realised loads of the games in my backlog are actually quite short in length. There’s a good number that I could probably smash through in an evening, and so while the real meat of my backlog will likely remain untouched, there are definitely some easy ones I could clear out with a conscious effort.

I’d be interested to see what other people’s backlogs add up to, but does anyone else dare really check through their collections and add it all up?

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