The Year of Living Gamegerously Begins

I have a problem. No, not that type of problem. No, not that type of problem either. My problem is this: I am an Obsessive Compulsive Steam/Origin/Uplay/GOG Sale buyer.

A bit of history. Up until 2007, I hardly ever bothered with gaming outside of failing miserably at trying to get Mansfield Town into the Premier League in Football Manager or watching the latest Cincinnati Bengal quarterback get marmalized in Madden (I have nightmares still about Akili Smith and it looks like he does to).

Then, a change. I spotted a shiny new thing called a Playstation 3. So, I got one. And then I saw another shiny new (well, newish) thing called an Xbox 360. So I got one of them too. And for the next five years bought every shiny new game that came out.

Then, in 2013 I decided that to build a PC. Not a very powerful one, but enough to play my beloved Skyrim with mods. And that’s when my problem started.

You see, around July of that year, my first Steam Summer sale happened. In those days, Steam sales had the eight hour flash deals as well. I saw Dark Souls at £4.99. I bought it. I saw the The Witcher games for £2.99 when just a year before they were £40. So I bought them too.

By the end of the sale I’d spend some £70 on games that I probably never gave a moments thought to buying at full price. I even used to set my alarm so that I got up early to catch the end of the 8am sale. 

And this carried on for every Steam sale with slightly diminishing results for the next three years and in the process built up a backlog of some 200 games that I’d never get round to playing.

So, when Robin Tate aka Bongothesane launched his Year of Living Gamegerously (very nearly spelt that Gangerously which would be medically unsound) or #YOLG, I jumped at the chance to get rid of the clutter. He has problems with buying shiny new games, I have problems buying shiny old games at a discount price which were shiny new things months ago.

I have my dirty 30 list set up of games I want to finish in the next year. I have a starting budget of only £25, which will increase by a fiver everytime I finish one of the Dirty 30. 

My next post will list the list of gems I have to finish in the next year and my progress so far.