757 Games in a Spreadsheet: Why I Barely Play Anymore

I've been keeping a list of videogames for years. It's not an aspirational Steam backlog or a collection meant to impress Reddit. It's a personal record, row by row, of what I've actually played.

For each title I log:

• Name
• Console
• Genre (or genres)
• Release year

That's it. No scores, no exact hours played, no reviews. Just facts. Over time, the spreadsheet became something like a diary - not of what I want to play, but of what I have played.

Today it stands at 757 entries. When I cross console with release year, I get a table that speaks louder than I do.

What the numbers say

A very specific golden age

The heat map doesn't lie. My peaks are tightly localized:

Console	Peak year	Games that year
PSX	1999	34
PS2	2005	29
DS	2009	19
PC	2016	28

In human terms: the original PlayStation hooked me in the late 90s, the PS2 carried me through adolescence, the Nintendo DS coincided with a stretch of life when I had more free time than I realized, and PC became my main platform through the 2000s, with one last big push between 2010 and 2017.

The years with the most titles across the whole list are 2005 (46), 2013 (44), and 2007/2009/1999 (38 each). This wasn't a steady hobby. It came in waves - waves that lined up with consoles I loved and life stages where I could afford the time.

PC as the backbone

Out of 757 games, 312 are on PC. Over 40%. PSX and PS2 follow, tied at 103 each, then the DS with 79.

Where I actually played: games by console

PC dominates the list, followed by PSX and PS2. Current-gen platforms barely register - no PS5, no Xbox Series, and only a handful of Switch titles.

Looking at the 2010s alone, PC accounts for most of my activity: between 2010 and 2017 I averaged more than 20 PC titles per year, peaking at 28 in 2016. After 2017, that number drops by half and never climbs back.

The 2018 cliff

This is the conclusion that bothers me most.

Between 2010 and 2017 I logged 258 games. From 2018 to today, 125. And the drop isn't gradual. It's a cliff.

The 2018 drop: games logged per release year

The chart makes the break obvious. I went from 30-35 titles a year between 2015 and 2017 to roughly half that from 2018 onward, with no recovery.

I went from roughly 30-35 titles a year to around 10-15. I never got the old rhythm back.

I didn't stop playing entirely. The hobby just stopped being central.

Consoles that don't exist (for me)

There's no PS5 on my list. No Xbox Series. The PS4 shows up 44 times total, with a peak of just 6 games in 2017. The Switch has 4 titles across its entire lifespan.

That's not technological indifference. It's disinterest. I haven't seriously considered buying the current generation because, honestly, I don't feel like I'm missing anything I want to play.

Genres: what defines me as a player

My three most frequent genres:

1. Adventure (138)
2. Survival horror (107)
3. Graphic adventure (87)

What I actually play: top genres

Adventure, survival horror, and graphic adventures make up the bulk of the list - a profile built on story, tension, and exploration rather than multiplayer or live-service.

I'm a story, atmosphere, and exploration player. Platformers, RPGs, and puzzles fill out the rest. I'm not a competitive online or live-service person - which is why titles like Genshin Impact or Fall Guys are on the list but don't define my profile.

What the data doesn't say (and why I almost stopped playing)

The numbers explain how much I play and when. They don't explain why the pace broke after 2017.

The feeling that the catalog isn't for me anymore

This is where what many people call "woke" comes in - and what I'd describe, more calmly, like this: more and more AAA titles seem designed first to check an ideological box and second to entertain.

I'm not talking about diversity in a cast. I genuinely don't care about that either way. I'm talking about when diversity stops being a fact of the world being represented and becomes the point of the game. When characters exist to signal virtues, when plots bend to fit narratives nobody asked for, when a moralizing tone replaces an emotional one.

Concrete examples of the feeling (not of technical quality):

• Games where the central conflict is "overcoming prejudice" instead of telling an interesting story.
• Remakes that rewrite classic characters to fit current standards, even when that betrays what made them memorable.
• Dialogue that sounds like an HR committee, not writers.
• Mechanics simplified or removed because they're "not inclusive" or because the target audience is no longer the player who was there before.

When I look at the catalog of the last five years and see The Last of Us Part II, Life is Strange in all its variants, Tell Me Why, Dustborn, Dragon Age: The Veilguard... I feel the same thing: it's not that they're technically bad. It's that they don't speak to me. I don't want to be lectured while pressing buttons. I want to feel something, explore a world, solve a mystery, survive something terrifying.

And there's less and less of that in the spotlight.

When remakes betray what you loved

Some of the clearest examples aren't original AAA pitches. They're remakes - projects that should have been safe bets, built on games people already loved.

I had real hope for the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. FFVII meant something to an entire generation of players, including me. The first part felt like a genuine attempt to rebuild a classic. Rebirth is where the trust broke: the sharper, more uncomfortable themes the original actually dealt with get sanded down or swapped out so nobody gets offended. Not expanded. Not recontextualized. Just softened.

The Spyro remake did something similar on a smaller scale. Enemies that originally carried machine guns now shoot some kind of purple paint. Because apparently showing a weapon in a game marketed to children is too much - even when the original game did exactly that, and nobody's childhood collapsed over it.

Kids aren't stupid. That's why millions of people - many of them young - are waiting for GTA VI, a game that is absolutely not for children, and everyone knows it. I was one of those kids during the Vice City era. Running over a prostitute for a refund was just a thing you could do in the game - grim, absurd, now a meme - but it reflected a certain unfiltered version of the world the series was always built on. You didn't have to endorse it. The game wasn't asking for your approval. It was giving you a sandbox with edges.

Today that same instinct gets treated like a design crime.

Labels, disclaimers, and cosmetic cowardice

Then there are the smaller tells that add up.

Character creators that ask you to pick Body Type 1 and Body Type 2 instead of man and woman - as if naming basic biological reality were somehow obscene.

Games that open with a message like "This game represents a vision of the reality of other times" - a disclaimer that pretends to respect history - and then ship with the sharp edges filed off anyway.

Female characters made deliberately plain or awkward where the original or the source material had charm, confidence, or simple attractiveness. I'm not looking for porn in a videogame, I'm looking for characters that look awesome and have a deep story. What I want is to evade from reality. A place that isn't a mirror of the real world. When I sit down to play, I don't want the same aesthetic and moral accounting I can get from a news feed. I want a world that goes somewhere interesting, even if that somewhere is ugly, dangerous, or fantasy.

When every remake, every big budget title, every "bold" narrative game starts from the assumption that the player needs to be managed, corrected, or protected from the material - I stop showing up. Not out of outrage. Out of boredom. The hobby stops feeling like play and starts feeling like someone else's homework.

Why my 2018+ list is full of remakes and indies

Look at the recent titles I have logged: Resident Evil 2/3/4 Remake, Silent Hill 2 Remake, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Dead Space Remake, Tomb Raider Remastered, Blasphemous, Signalis, Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3.

The pattern is obvious. Either I play things that already existed and I liked, rebuilt with new graphics. Or I take refuge in small developers who still make games about playing, not about positioning. Western narrative blockbusters have almost vanished from my radar.

This isn't blind nostalgia. Elden Ring is from 2022. Baldur's Gate 3 is from 2023. Death Stranding 2 is on my 2025 list. When something genuinely interests me, I play it. The problem is there are fewer and fewer candidates.

The hobby became a filter, not a default

Before, when a new game came out in a series I liked, I'd buy it almost on autopilot. Today I research it, read opinions, watch gameplay, and often discard it before starting.

That explains the 2018 drop. It wasn't a single event. It was the moment I stopped trusting that "a new game" meant "something I'll enjoy."

Conclusion: a player in semi-retirement

I'm not exaggerating when I say videogames were central to my identity for decades. The 1999 PSX, the 2005 PS2, the 2009 DS, the 2016 PC - those are real chapters of my life, not just statistics.

But the table confirms something else too: since 2018 I've been playing at the pace of a secondary hobby. Fewer titles, almost nothing on current consoles, more remakes than new bets, and a growing disconnect from what the mainstream market considers important.

I'm not writing this to say "games were better before." That would be too simple. I'm writing it because my own data forces me to be honest: something changed - not just in my schedule, but in what I feel when I look at the 2025 catalog and can't find anything that excites me.

Maybe I'll come back. Sometimes a Signalis, a Hollow Knight: Silksong, or a Resident Evil reminds me why I liked this. But today, looking at that spreadsheet, I'm clearer than ever that my golden age as a player is behind me, and the current industry doesn't seem very interested in winning me back.