SteamLeft Lets You Know You Will Never Complete Your Steam Backlog

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Every year Steam and GoG.com and GamersGate and other services offer huge discounts on games during their holiday sales, and gamers on web forums lament their ever-growing backlog and the impossibility of ever finishing the games they just bought, let alone the rest. Now SteamLeft will quantify your backlog so you know just how dismal things really are!

SteamLeft Lets You Know You Will Never Complete Your Steam Backlog

According to the site info they estimate time by rolling up the list of games in your account, then using a database called ‘HowLongToBeat.com’ to fix a time to each game, and then subtract off how much you have played on each game. Here is what they say:

SteamLeft takes all the games in your steam library and compares your playtime for each game with the amount of time it takes to beat that game. Then it adds up all the differences to give you the total time in would take to beat all the remaining games in your library. These numbers are just rough estimations, but it is a fun figure to think about.

SteamLeft was made in a weekend (give or take) by two guys who have too many Steam games. Data on game time is taken from HowLongToBeat.com. Random facts about what you could be doing in your free time instead of beating your Steam library were taken from all over the internet. Be sure to see them all!

The report tells you in terms of continuous time how long you’d need to complete your library – without sleeping, of course! It also notes some other things you could do in similar amounts of time – one other choice was listening to Freebird 47.000+ times!

And this accounting doesn’t even take other game libraries into account – as noted there are several digital distribution sources, and I have hundreds of games on GoG.com and GamersGate, dozens on Direct2Drive and Beamdog and Amazon and Origin and UPlay and the Mac App Store. It also doesn’t take into account variations in-game length by personal playstyle – HowLongToBeat.com lists four times (Main, Main & Extra, Combined, and Completionist) … and you can really add hours depending on how you play. Also, I have always said that I will make time to replay my favorites pretty much each year.

Suffice to say I will never catch up.

Head to SteamLeft, connect your Steam account and check it out!

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About the Author

Michael Anderson
I have loved technology for as long as I can remember - and have been a computer gamer since the PDP-10! Mobile Technology has played a major role in my life - I have used an electronic companion since the HP95LX more than 20 years ago, and have been a 'Laptop First' person since my Compaq LTE Lite 3/20 and Powerbook 170 back in 1991! As an avid gamer and gadget-junkie I was constantly asked for my opinions on new technology, which led to writing small blurbs ... and eventually becoming a reviewer many years ago. My family is my biggest priority in life, and they alternate between loving and tolerating my gaming and gadget hobbies ... but ultimately benefits from the addition of technology to our lives!