Reading the comments - am I the weird one for just remembering?
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 :)
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.
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.
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.
HowLongToBeat.com
Helps me keep track of which games I've played and which games I own on which platform to avoid double-buying.
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'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 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've been using Launchbox, especially since I play emulator games. They've improved the efficiency of large libraries and added support for RetroAchievements, although I manually toggle completion status since I don't always use it to launch my games so the time tracker isn't accurate.
More importantly it let's me hit randomize, so if I'm feeling adventurous it'll pull a game from my backlog I might have got from anywhere.
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 just started a checklist in Joplin, gonna make a new list for each year.
I've set up my own DB in Notion for this.
I use Gamebrary because it's FOSS, so I suppose you could in theory clone the repo and self-host it, but IDK how self-hosting ready it is.
Yeah this seems like a good alternative, thanks for the shout!
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 don't intentionally use it to keep track of the games I've played but I've been using GameFAQs to keep track of older console games I have not yet played. It's not perfect for this as I need to use documents to keep track of some additional information but I have yet to find a better alternative.
For PC games, some of the platforms I use, like GOG and Itch, actually have built in features to help me to keep track of what games I haven't played yet. For the others (and mobile) I still have to use documents to keep track of this as well.
Like goodreads but for games? Name it goodplays maybe?
https://www.howlongtobeat.com/ has some features to help with this. Will enable you to import games and playtimes from Steam.
On Steam I have categories for played, unplayed, playing, and never touching again. Works well, but that backlog is brutal.
I hear you and if you keep up with the free games from gog epic and prime gaming giveaways. It never stops growing.
Going forward? RetroAchievements, Steam, GOG, and LaunchBox to tie it all together. PSN trophy integration to LaunchBox would be cool too, because PS3 stuff is never coming to any of those platforms and I have history there, too.
For historical stuff, that's in my memory exclusively.
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've only played one game since 2005.
I do the organizing with categories/tags in game libraries that supports it; want to play, playing, beaten, given up, unbeatable.
I also have something similar in Playnite, though I don't love that program.
I also love notebooks, I keep a notebook around for writing in during games, and I set up lists for each year with a column for bought games and one for played games. With this I can see what games I have played since 2016/17 or thereabout.
I love statistics, and seeing when and for how long I played a game is fun.