Overwhelmed, maybe some advice:D

[trobadur85]

Hey guys
I am new to the forums however I've been reading the site for over a year!

I recently hit the 400 games owned on my XBOX360 and it just hit me... When am I gonna play these? :/

I've been thinking lately to just get rid of everything via bundle or individual sales and get a next-gen console and start fresh, this time being really picky with my purchases...
I can't help but feel a massive dissapointment over this situation :/
Anyone here experienced anything similar?

Any advice for the more cool headed enthusiasts?

[Tanooki]

Kind of strange you'd buy that much and never open the things up. I've never done that for a system before, but I have had the rare game I intended to play and eventually just ditched it but it's rare.

The way I see it is, do you really need another system? If you've got 400 games, even if the 360 is a flaky system, that's a LOT of stuff to do you've never done before so you're not hurting for variety at least. I imagine though some of those games, not a majority, but some should value as high or higher than when they were new possibly so you'll make a little on those, but most you're going to take a hit on.

[Exhuminator]

I've come to accept that collecting games is almost as fun as playing them. The whole hunter gatherer aspect entrenched in our DNA I guess. I would recommend holding on to the 360 games, they'll always be there for you. If you sell them you'll regret it.

I wrote something about this once.

[TSTR]

burn everything in effigy

[ejamer]

Why did you buy the games in the first place? If you just sell everything and "start fresh" it feels kind of... wasteful?

Maybe it's a better idea to NOT buy a new console and start playing. Skip this generation, choosing instead to enjoy the huge mass of gaming excellence you've built up, and then decide where to go from there.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I recently hit the 400 games owned on my XBOX360 and it just hit me... When am I gonna play these? :/

That's really not that many games...

Consistent with Exhuminator's statement, my advice is to separate your "collecting" hobby from your "playing" hobby. Once you admit that collecting and organizing games you might never play is at least as enjoyable as playing them, you will not worry about your "backlog" quite so much. You will simply enjoy having a large collection and enjoy playing whatever you want whenever you want.

I have several thousand games, and I have no intention of playing, much less completeing, them all. (Life is too short for that, and some of the games in my collection are really, really bad.) Nonetheless, I genuinely enjoy adding new games to my collection, reading about them, discussing them, etc. I also enjoy playing games, and it is nice to have a very broad selection of them at my fingertips. I have separated my "collecting" hobby from my "playing" hobby, however, and I have been much happier ever since I stopped compulsively trying to beat every game in my collection.

[Exhuminator]

"collecting" hobby / "playing" hobby

Yep. That's the secret. Realizing that they are indeed two separate hobbies unto themselves.

I fully endorse having a gaming budget. Like, "I am only allowed to spend X per week on buying video games." That kind of budget. That way you can collect for as long as you want, but not feel guilty about how much money you're spending on it. I've been doing that for a while now and it works great for me. Whereas before I was spending a small fortune on buying games and feeling like a pig about it.

[prfsnl_gmr]

"collecting" hobby / "playing" hobby

Yep. That's the secret. Realizing that they are indeed two separate hobbies unto themselves.

I fully endorse having a gaming budget. Like, "I am only allowed to spend X per week on buying video games." That kind of budget. That way you can collect for as long as you want, but not feel guilty about how much money you're spending on it. I've been doing that for a while now and it works great for me. Whereas before I was spending a small fortune on buying games and feeling like a pig about it.

I agree and do the same thing. (I do break it rather severely every now and then, however... )

[CRTGAMER]

Get advice from MAS.

I was in a Gamestop line, another customer was selling his 360 and was only offered 50 bucks trade in credit. I told him why not just keep the 360 and invest in a ten dollar video switch? Have both the Xbox One and 360 ready to play. So many now "last gen" games for only five to ten bucks! That equals to at least five to ten games versus one new system game.

[Sarge]

I'll chime in with some of the same advice. I've got a large physical collection of games (over 1000), spanning many console cycles. For me, it's about the ability to play the game if I feel like it down the road. To some degree, just having them gives me a small sense of satisfaction.

Now, the thing to really keep in mind, though, is that if it's something you're not going to get to soon, don't bother picking it up at full price. Right now, I haven't been buying a whole lot of games at launch. The backlog is big enough that I can't justify a new system, either. There's so much stuff that I have that's worth playing that I can afford to wait and not get the latest and greatest, unless it's something like a Zelda game or SSB4.

I fully endorse the idea of a gaming budget. I don't keep one, per se, but I'm also a cheapskate to some degree. I have internal thresholds that trigger based on what I think games are worth, or whether I think those games are going to drop in price quickly. Unsuccessful but interesting games are going to bomb fast (like Remember Me), games that you might like but don't review well (like Lords of Shadow 2) are going to drop at some point as well. Nintendo games hold value like crazy, so you have to wait a long time on those.

Anyway, don't feel bad about it, hang on to them, especially if some are RPGs. You never know what they might be worth down the road. And just don't feel like you have to play them all to completion. I passed that point a long time ago. It's also why I don't go crazy for every RPG released now like I used to. I mean, I've still got SNES stuff I bought years ago in the backlog! There's not a chance I'll ever finish them all.