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!
I have definitely not played 4,000 games. I tend to stick on a few games till I beat them and then I move on, sometimes returning to replay. I don’t have an astounding memory, but if a game is mentioned I’ll remember if I played it or not and that is good enough for me. If I forget a good experience, well, that’s another opportunity to have it for the “first time”, a la that old tumblr post about wanting to be able to selectively erase your memory so you could re-experience your favorite book for the first time.
No. I remember all the games I’ve played. I can’t list them all, however if you were to ask me “hey have you ever played xyz”, I would remember if I had or not.
Well, the point of such an app would be to have them listed I would guess.
Yes. I was just responding to the comment asking if he/she was the only one who remembers if they’ve played a game.
Hmm… for me, it’s less about memory and more about helping myself see a pattern of what I like and what I don’t, which eventually helps me make better purchasing decisions.
Like, when I look at a list of my favorite games, I can conclusively tell you: I like challenging, replayable games with real-time action, synergy among their mechanics, and mechanical variety.
For me, this knowledge would not have been attainable if I didn’t sit down and put together a list of what I like/what I don’t like.
Look at you just raw dogging your steam library.
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?
There is nothing to miss out on by just keeping a list of which games you have played and when. It’s just an extra step after finishing playing a game.
Does steam recording the last launch date of a game ruin your next experience with a game for you ?
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.
Yeah, I think I’ll remove the 100% from mine too, it’s been a while since the last time I did it and at one point I stopped enjoying doing it
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.
My Steam library. I have everything categorized and keep them in a category until I have played and completed them to my satisfaction.
I have categories too, I have trash category for uninteresting games from humble bundles and random keys purchases, I have the played category for games I played, and I have the uber trash shit game category for sacred 3 and two worlds
I use Questlog and playlists to actually see what I’ve started/completed/paused/dropped and in which year happened
Wow! This is almost exactly what I had in mind! Thanks for sharing.
It’s a cool open source project by a single dev, present on Mastodon and very receptive about feedbacks :)
Yeah checked it out last night, made an account and started logging! However I was not able to find the source code for this?
Uhm maybe my memory was at fault here about being OSS, better asking directly @kaiserkiwi@corteximplant.com
@ItsMeAlex It’s not Open Source. Maybe at one time it will be but it wasn’t started as one and I don’t really have the capacity right now to maintain it as open source.
Thank you for the clarification! Then I correct myself, “it’s a cool free project backed by a single dev” :)
@pienoyer May I ask about the missing piece? (You said “almost”) 😁
Hello Mr Developer 😅 I couldn’t find the source code, it would be perfect if that was! Otherwise I can understand if u are keeping a closed hobby project.
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.
All good dude! I was mostly wanting to keep an overview for myself so that I could:
- Rate the games I played
- Add notes/thoughts about the game
- See when I played the game and how long it took me to finish it. Those are the three main statistics im interested in. Of course, I generally remember if I have played a game or not, I just like keeping track of things in more detail :)
backloggery.com is your solution.
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’ve started rating games I finish, or didn’t like enough to finish, in backloggd.com
I do the same for movies and tv series on a different website, too.
I’ve started to use Playnite. It’s nice to have a complete catelog of all my games. Most of my real games (ie ignoring random freebies) are on steam, but I’ve collected a bunch elsewhere like gog, epic, humble bundle, and others. You can give it credentials and set up nearly all the major catelogs so that it can generate a listing of all games you own.
I use it to mark when I completed a game, but I’ve only had it for a couple years, so I generally go by memory or by steam statistics of hours played.
Downside is that it’s Windows only. It’s open source and free, and I still have a windows machine for most of my gpu games, but I mainly game on my steam deck or my Linux laptop these days, so I need to find another option or see if Playnite is wine/Proton compatible.
Obsidian is my main notetaking app, so I use the kanban plugin to keep a list of games I’m playing, plan to play, and finished.
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.
Backloggd works great for me because I want both game/library tracking and user reviews, including my own once I finish a game. If someone only cares about the former, backloggery.com is probably just as good.
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.
Your memory?
