Gamers could be thankful for the opportunity to clean their libraries

Aug 2, 2014 16:09 GMT  ·  By

I have been thinking for a while about the effect that Steam, the digital distribution service created by Valve, has been having on PC gaming and about the way using it, with its massive sales and its convenient patches, has been changing how we approach the hobby that occupies so much time in our lives.

As I was scrolling down the list of video games that I own and thinking about which of them I have completed and which I have spent less than 5 hours with, I thought about whether I could actively hide some of them.

I poked around Steam for a while and did not get to see any sort of options to create a customized view or to eliminate individual titles from it.

I then searched the Internet and discovered that more Steam users than I would have initially thought have clashed with the same problem, some of them because they simply made too many purchases and some because they are actively ashamed by the games they have paid for or received as gifts from friends.

The simplest and more Valve-like solution to this problem would be for Steam to simply add an option to remove a game from a player’s library forever as long as he is willing to pay a small sum, say 1 dollar or Euro.

To make sure that there’s no outrage from users because Valve is benefiting from something as unimportant as a removal of a game, all the money obtained from the new feature could be added to a charity fund or something similar.

The benefits would be solid: slimmer libraries for players, a chance for Valve to look good while adding a new feature,  and money that could go to a good cause.

At the same time, each individual gamer could eliminate some of the pressure that is associated with the existence of a backlog and could focus on playing the best titles in his collection.

Of course, the easier move would be to just tweak the games list on Steam in order to hide certain titles, but that solution lacks a certain elegance.

Analysts are predicting that in a few years digital distribution, both on the PC and on home consoles, will dominate games sales, and it will be interesting to see whether Valve and other platform holders are ready to try and monetize their services in interesting ways.