14 DAY TRIAL // I am afraid to look at the list of games I have bought through Steam and it’s not because of the recent sales that Valve has conducted through its digital distribution service; it’s because I already know that I won’t install or run pretty much all of them ever again.
It gets even worse when I take into account all the other titles I have from the former Impulse or from GamersGate and even the old-school disks I have lying around.
The problem is not that I only got the games themselves just for the low prices but that, no matter how I plan my future, it’s high unlikely that I will ever have the time to play all that I want to play or get through this huge catalog of accumulated media.
There’s the possibility that I will lose my job and that somehow I get an inheritance from a long lost relative that would allow me to do nothing but play games for the following 40 years or so, but it’s highly unlikely that this scenario will ever become reality.
What will probably happen is that, as I get older and become more responsible, I will actually have less time to play video games.
Over the last year I have rediscovered the extraordinary pleasure of reading and I give that about one and a half to two hours an evening, which naturally comes out of the time previously reserved for gaming.
I also became more conservative and I prefer revisiting old titles I love, from Civilization IV with mods to Birth of the Federation and Vampire: The Masquerade, to getting the newest shooter or role-playing games.
Just these two trends will probably mean that I will never play through Command & Conquer IV, which I recently bought, or the old XCOM spin-offs I got off Steam and that I might already have enough games to last me a lifetime.