One year I made a spreadsheet, but it was a pain to update/maintain. Before (and after) it was just a text file listing. But for a few years now, I use bookmarks in Firefox. The URL of a game’s store page is the closest thing to a key value, and having the minimal data associated with it in the title is quicker than trying to manipulate it in a spreadsheet and flip between that and the browser.
When I see a game I might be interested in, I bookmark it into one of the following folders:
- Buy it.
- Conditional on price or possibly whether ProtonDB gives enough reports it works (for non-Linux games). I distill that information into something like: “p? (<$20; w+) TITLE” where p? means “does it run okay on Proton?” If a game does run okay on proton it gets p+ instead. This also now includes games that had exclusivity on another store (w+ means wait a year, explained more below).
- Unreleased games that look promising. I’ve never really done preorders. (This is for truly unreleased games, not ones in early access; I don’t have a problem with early access games, if there’s enough content and stability to them to buy them in their current state.)
- (Rare, but there) VR-exclusive games that maybe I’ll buy and play someday. For now I lack the necessary reality hardware.
- (For those that graduate through the system) Bought games, which are nested inside of a dated folder to track when they were bought.
For the ones I do buy, I add the price I paid (though it happens when I’m deciding to buy them, as I use it to figure out how much I’m spending before purchase). After I’ve played them, I also add a prefix of up to three exclamation points for titles I thought were really good buys.
About 30% of the games I bought last winter got at least one exclamation point. More of those came from the conditional set than the definite-buy group (though the conditional group was slightly under twice the size). On average, for conditional games, the sale prices were slightly below my cutoff price (within a few dollars).
The conditional price is based on several signals, including reviews, particularly negative reviews. If a game is noted to be shorter or lacking in some specific way that makes me wary of buying it, but it seems salable at a lower price (often, reviews note that: “wait for a sale”), that becomes the condition.
The Proton condition is generally less relevant: by the time I play a game it probably works in Proton/WINE. But some games have notes from players for how to avoid crashes or increase framerates, so ProtonDB is usually worth checking for non-Linux games.
The wait condition is because of the store exclusivity some games have now. I disagree with that practice, so I make a point not to buy a game that was exclusive for a full year after its exclusivity expires. There are a ton of games to buy and play, and while many great games get exclusivity, a far greater number do not play such games with their customers. If you want to play games with your company’s reputation by making exclusivity deals, expect to be judged for it. Maybe the money is worth it, but that doesn’t mean gamers have to respect the decision.
Why not use Steam’s wishlist feature? While there is some convenience to that feature, it doesn’t allow for annotations as my bookmarks system does. There are also some privacy implications to wishlisting, but I’m not sure what call I’d make if the wishlist system were more comprehensive.
A few statistics: I currently only have one unconditional game in my list (likely more reflective of not having reviewed my conditional list and promoted some out of it). There are 41 conditional games, and about a third are holdovers. Some didn’t meet my price last time, and others I might decide against getting. There are also 19 unreleased games I’m looking at.
In terms of satisfaction, some combination of luck and effectiveness I didn’t really feel like I had any duds in the latest set of games I bought and played. On the other hand, I don’t necessarily remember all of them from their titles. I remember most, though, and the ones I don’t couldn’t have been particularly bad, because I definitely remember the games I’ve bought and felt like they were a waste—some because they’re just bad, but others because they’re not for me.
That last grouping is particularly interesting to me. Even for games I don’t buy or even consider, some sound like they’d be cool if I enjoyed that type of game. Others feel like if they had a different concept or changed the gameplay (akin to what I discussed recently about Cortex Command), they would be really awesome. There are some games that really nail an aesthetic, but the gameplay just isn’t there.
(You can stop reading now unless you want to hear some brief thoughts on Firefox’s bookmarks system.)
The biggest problem with the system is the lack of polish for Firefox’s bookmarks system. They still don’t have a tab-based bookmark browser, for example. They’ve tried to get that done (getting so far as to even have a version hiding behind a preference at one point, if I recall correctly), with some good work put into it, only to have it skim off the atmosphere before it could land, and now it is bitrotting as it drifts through space. Oy.
To try to look up a game quickly, the easiest way (if I recall its name) is to prefix my lookup with an asterisk in the awesomebar (which restricts it to bookmarks). E.g., “* Amnesia” would show Amnesia: Rebirth, a currently-unreleased game I’ll look at once it’s released (I enjoyed SOMA by the same folks, but while I have played at least a half-dozen horror-style games, I still have mixed feelings about the genre in terms of the gameplay mechanics involved and the lack of player agency beyond run-and-hide).
But if I don’t remember a title, or just want to browse, the bookmarks menu is cumbersome when you’re trying to get into folders inside folders inside folders in a cascading menu. A basic iconized file browser would feel much nicer.