Why do rational people own hundreds of games they’ll never touch, and what does this reveal about digital ownership psychology?
Tim owns thousands of dollars worth of Steam games and has played maybe 150 of them. Ian’s library contains over 200 titles with perhaps 40 seeing meaningful playtime. Al hoards 600+ games but estimates he’s finished around 50. These aren’t outliers suffering from poor impulse control. They represent the new normal for PC gaming, where owning games became disconnected from playing them.
Digital distribution broke the psychological barriers that once regulated game purchasing. Physical copies required effort: driving to stores, handling money, carrying boxes home, finding shelf space. Each purchase demanded deliberate action and created lasting consequences. Steam eliminated every friction point except clicking “buy now.” The result transformed occasional purchases into reflexive behaviour.
Steam sales exploit this psychological shift with calculated precision. That $60 game you wanted six months ago drops to $15, but only for 48 hours. Your brain registers this as savings rather than spending. You buy immediately to avoid missing out on a deal, then add the title to a backlog that grows faster than you can play through it.
The mathematics reveal the scope of this behaviour. Steam users collectively own billions of games they haven’t installed. The platform’s achievement statistics show completion rates for most games hovering below 50%, often far lower. Players routinely purchase games during sales that they don’t play for months or years, if ever.
This creates the Library of Shame phenomenon where game collections become digital hoarding rather than curated entertainment libraries. The ease of acquisition overwhelmed our ability to consume content. We buy games faster than we can play them, accumulating digital possessions that exist primarily as owned objects rather than experienced entertainment.
The psychology resembles collecting behaviour more than consumption behaviour. Physical collectors understand their limitations because shelf space and storage costs impose natural boundaries. Digital libraries have no such constraints. Steam can hold thousands of games without requiring additional storage space or organization effort. The collection grows invisibly until you accidentally notice you own 400 games and feel vaguely ashamed about your purchasing decisions.
Sales culture reinforces this pattern by making purchases feel mandatory rather than optional. Steam’s seasonal sales create artificial urgency around products that will exist indefinitely. Games don’t spoil, go out of print, or become unavailable, but sales psychology tricks our brains into treating them like limited resources. We buy games we might want someday rather than games we want to play immediately.
The sunk cost fallacy compounds the problem. Once you own hundreds of unplayed games, acknowledging the waste feels too painful, so you keep buying more games to justify the collection’s existence. Each new purchase becomes proof that your library has value, even when logic suggests you’ll never play most of these titles.
Social factors amplify individual behaviour. Steam’s public profile system encourages comparison and competition around library size. Players share screenshots of massive game collections as status symbols, treating purchased games like achievements rather than entertainment products. The number of games owned becomes more important than the number of games enjoyed.
This behaviour reveals how digital ownership changed our relationship with media consumption. Physical limitations once forced careful selection and prioritization. Digital abundance eliminated scarcity, removing the psychological pressure to make deliberate choices about entertainment spending. We buy games like we’re building insurance policies against future boredom, collecting options we’ll never exercise.
The Library of Shame represents a broader shift from ownership as utility to ownership as possibility. We buy games because we might want to play them, not because we will play them. Our digital libraries become museums of intentions rather than tools for entertainment. Every unplayed game represents a version of ourselves we thought we might become but never did.
How many unplayed games in your Steam library would you need to own before admitting you’re collecting digital objects rather than buying entertainment?
