This topic is meant for discussion about your subjective views on game collecting.
Share with us how "greedy" are you. Do you have few games in your collection or maybe it's a four digit number? Are you ashamed that some games in your collection are not receiving your attention? Are you on some kind of special game-collecting quest? Do you splash the cash for the "out of the mint" games or you prefer to buy cheap good oldies?
Whatever is on your mind about the matter, let loose those typing finger!

MY GAME COLLECTING STORY
Ever since December 1999 when I started following PC gaming scene I'm running a wishlist of games I should try out before I drop the bucket. And the most interesting thing about that is that until now that list was always kept on paper only! It will continue to be on paper (as it gives me immense pleasure when I cross a game from my wishlist :D) but now there is a CYBER WISHLIST also, all tidy up as if some list maniac polished it. *chuckles* Games come and go from that wishlist, sometimes I loose an interest after few years of not acquiring a game, sometimes they are replaced by other better versions of the similar idea and some are still there from the very beginning persistently eluding me.
That list will be alive for some time because as you can see about 50% of those games are not available either on GOG or Steam and those are the only two platforms for my game collecting (I do use GamersGate, Humble Bundle and such but only for getting cheap Steam keys) beside some old boxed versions I have. Yeah, I also hate duplicates, so if I own a game on Steam I don't need it on GOG and vice versa and if I own a boxed copy of a game I don't need it on both Steam or GOG.
As for my other collecting habits, I only collect games that I plan to play. I really don't see any point in having something you know you'll never use. Situations when I added a game to my collection that wasn't present on my wishlist are extremely rare, but that did happen few times.
Until late 2013/ early 2014 my backlog was monitored somewhat strictly. Then I become active here on GOG and learned the ways of big sales, game trading and giveaways...the holy trinity XD. So my backlog turned from "Don't add anything you're not going to play right away" into "Add games you can acquire cheaply and play them later when they get their turn".
My current collection is moderately big, between 330 and 400 games (85 on GOG, 165 on Steam and about 80 freeware/abandonware titles) depending if you count some GOLD/GOTY/BUNDLE editions as one game or every game in the package separately.
The most important thing to me is that even though my game collecting habits changed, my game playing habits didn't. I still game a lot and plan to play every single title I own eventually, and since I'm still young and good organized I believe I'll managed it. :)

As I need a way to "cleanse my greedy gaming sins", I'll be doing one giveaway every month of this year. You can find the links to them below. Please post everything giveaways related there and everything related to the discussion topic here.

GIVEAWAYS
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

When I started having the laptop, I just downloaded every game I owned. Easy and simple. Then I came to the point that I couldn't, so that's an issue. I don't think I have too many games though. There are people who have a thousand video games, I'm not one of them. I just have a lot of video games because I like video games. And I don't quite beat them all, but I don't feel like I have to.
I probably have over a hundred but under two hundred video games on the laptop! The iPad is another story. A lot of iPad games do this thing where they're "free for a limited time" and I snagged a lot of those during those times.

I have almost 500 games on steam, but most of those are from humble bundles and freebies/promotions, and "vote for us in greenlight and get a key when we go through" things. Quite a few of them I tried for 2 minutes and realised I'm not going to ever really play them. At one point there was definitely an aspect of collecterness to it, as I ran a script to add all the F2P games on steam into my account, which significantly boosted the number (doesn't help that you get XP and gain steam levels for having more games).

I'm still interested in video games, obviously, but have given up on the collector mentality now. I'm still incredibly stingey, though. I don't think I've ever bought a game full price on release (a couple of kickstarters not counted), and I freely admit that while I want to support devs, I go for the lowest price I can, and don't mind waiting months/years for it. I'd say that is at least a step up from my pirating days, which I'm proud of, especially considering I'm no longer working, and am a starving student again :D.

When I started buying games from digital stores it was so I could play great games that I had missed when they were released, I have played quite a few of them, and intend to keep working my way through them. I try to concentrate on playing games that are new to me rather than something I am already familiar with.

I have in the past brought games because they were cheap and sounded like they might be fun to play, but without particularly wanting to play them, particularly from bundles. Some of these have been great, others not so great. Most will probably never be played, which does not bother me because I did not expect much out of them when I brought them. These days I will only buy a game if I know I intend to play it. If a game made it into my collection as part of a bundle I brought for something else then I will probably totally ignore it.

Pretty slow start. Good thing we have an entire year available to fill this thread with game collection stories. :)

I spent several years keeping myself entertained with casual and browser based games. Last year I came back to GOG,and discovered plenty of games that many people said I needed to play. Also, there all this stores and bundles and sales.

The result is that in one year I increased my game collection in hundreds of games but with not so much time to play them all.

So, do I have more games than I should? Probably but I think the prices I paid were good enough and plenty of them could be considered essentials.

I plan to buy lots less games this year and I'll see if I am greedy or it was just a natural result of not having many games and the opportunities of getting them cheap.

As for me, i'm not a collector of games. I buy what i think i'll like, after careful research. Most of my games in GOG (around 80) are games that i've bought back then as a kid and then sold them secondhand to buy something else with the money, or rented them from friends and/ or stores. Now is the perfect opportunity to buy/ rebuy them & of course replay them one by one.

As for my physical games (around 60), i really like to have the first editions (not the "Sold Out" or "PC Gamer" that ship without manual and other goodies) and sometimes when i find a game in original packaging and in good price, i re-buy it and then i give away the "cheaper" edition that i might have. ;-)

Until fairly recently I used to be the complete opposite of a game collector. I used to be super selective about which games I'd buy and play and didn't care much for digital distribution until Dota 2 and DCUO forced me to install Steam back in 2012.
Then one day I stumbled upon the Humble Jumbo Bundle in Dec 2013, decided to give indie games a try, and from that point on my game purchasing habits changed radically.
My Steam library quickly jumped from 10 to over 600 in over the course of a year through the help countless bundles and trading. Eventually I realized I couldn't handle that many games and coupled with the fact I grew satisfied with Steam's service I went back to my selective days.
Which means nowadays I only buy meaningful games from GOG and some Groupees bundles because I like what they're doing.
Finally, I confess I'm a cheapskate (for income reasons) which doesn't mind waiting years for a game's definitive edition and big discounts. So far I've only bought a handful of games at full price and the only one I've backed was Underworld Ascension (GO BACK IT!).

Just started my collecting in November and already have over 40 Steam games and 10 here on GOG. These sales are crazy addictive. I see how its going to be a problem, as I can only spend an hour or two a day gaming. Must slow down...

(Linking to the Official Stop Buying Games Self-Help Group.)

I'm not a collector. I think that I simply suffer from the "shiny" syndrome. When I find something I like or I get a nice idea, I buy it or scribble something about it and research it a little, and then, unless it's really compelling and I have lots of free time, I do nothing with it / about it.

So even before digital I had a lot more content than I consumed, but the much lower cost we now have in gaming (and to a much smaller extent for other digital content) made it much worse and having less spare time made it worse.

I'm not a huge collector and only this week built a pc capable of playing the latest demanding games. I have around 50 games, mainly picked up during steam sales, but sadly not enough time to play them all!

I have just set up a GOG account and look forward to expanding my library here. I enjoy the excitement of game sales and have been having fun with the Insomnia sale, during which I have picked up a couple of titles.

I'd say I'm 4 parts gamer and 1 part collector.
If I really like a series I may go out to search for the original one, even if it is not very good. But that is rare.
I enjoy holding the product in my hand. Only recently have I gone the digital way. I'm still not a convert. None of my laptops had an optical drive built in, so I used CD emulators to play games on them. This past helped me to accept this new reality somewhat.

I am a bit picky on what I buy, but I also enjoy giving a game a chance and being surprised. I play almost everything except complex sims and demanding sports games (Micro Machines and Speedball 2 are OK).
My friends talked a bit about the strange games only I would play. Text adventure games? ASCII dungeon crawls? Dating sims? JRPGs? No problem! (Also, I couldn't play those complex 3D games they played on my computer).

For some reason, my gaming habits got stuck on the early 2000's. I really liked those games. Maybe because I stopped having the extra time and the fast machines to play them. GOG has many of the games I wanted to play at that time. I think this is me, only my lag is bigger.

My backlog is waiting for some more attention, but I'm waiting to overcome a major hurdle in my life before I can devote the time to gaming and other hobbies.

What a coincidence, I just started my second playthrough of Portal couple of hours ago (first one was back around 2008).
Yeah, that comic could apply to me also. For example I finished Fallout for the first time yesterday.
Nice post all around, thanks for sharing. :)

Portal is THE game I want to play but I won't, because of the DRM. It's my own personal stand. But hey, if you don't suffer for your ideals, what is their use? :-P

I bough a pack with all the Fallout games (they were just 3 at the time). I played the first one for less than an hour. I think I never finished the tutorial of the second one. And I never played Tactics.
I also purchased a Baldur's Gate pack. I did play the first one for an afternoon. And Arcanum for about a day.
These are big games. I wonder if I'll ever finish them.

It would be fair to ask: why play for just a bit if I know I won't be able to devote the time to them?
Well, I once purchased Shogun: Total War plus the Mongol Invasion expansion, long after the games came out. It stayed unopened for over 10 months. Then I installed it, and noticed that, after installing the expansion the entire game was in Spanish! There was no game option to change the language. There was no configuration file to revert to English. I returned to the store and showed the receipt. The attendants looked at it puzzled. Then looked at me funny, as in "is this for real?". When they saw my expression did not change, they looked at the paper once more. Then they said "Oh, wait! This is from last year!" (they thought I had travelled back in time two months, or more likely, that it was a really lame forgery). No, they could not help me. I tried calling the distributor. Nothing could be done. If only I had noticed earlier...
So I downloaded a copy of the expansion from the internet. Saw that it worked OK, and put the game aside for all these years.
Of course, now I can find the game for 1/10th of what I payed for it.
One day I'll conquer you, Japan. Just you wait! Those Spaniards won't help you!

My plan is to play the games from my collection in chronologic order. I think that makes sense.

I buy games only if I know I will play them, and I tend to do a lot of research before buying a game to be sure that it is a game I like. I don't really consider myself a collector, as I don't buy games that I know are bad, to complete collections (I have every Might & Magic-game, except 9, I also have Empire Earth 1 and 2, but not 3). I do play all my games, and I usually install them right after purchase, and start playing.

I did collect a tiny bit many years ago though. I bought some games online, such as Quake 1 & 2, Unreal, Hexen 2 + mission packs for some of the games, all in jewel cases with manuals included. I still have it all, of course, and I can't see myself ever selling them. It's a part of gaming history! :P

Looking at my shelf, I see 22 Xbox 360-games, and I have finished all of them. I have also finished all of my four Xbox One-games. For some reason, my console-backlog is non-existent. I have only finished one fifth of my GOG-games. I guess it is because of the abundance of cheap games, it makes my library grow faster than I can play the games, but I currently have 4 playthroughs on different games in progress, so I'm steadily grinding my way through the massive GOG-backlog :)