this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Hiya, just newly thought about something: wouldn't be nice if there was a simple way of checking what games you have played over the years, a way to keep track of wether you liked the game or not, how much time you spent playing it etc.. Currently, personally i only check steam library for those kinda details. But it would be nice if there was a more dedicated solution for it, like a selfhosted app or something along those lines.

I'm not well educated regarding this so if there are any current solutions for this then please let me know, and let me know if you yourself have a special kind of system for this!

have a great rest of your weekend!

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[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 49 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Reading the comments - am I the weird one for just remembering?

[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago

If by remembering you mean "I use no tools to keep track of games I've played and make no special effort at remembering, either I do or I don't", then same. But also in the last few years I've been playing a lot less games than I used to (and I didn't really play that many to start with).

[–] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You probably have different gaming habits than me, or a hell of a memory. I've likely played over 4 thousand different games over the course of my life so far.

... Now I want to use one of those tools to try to figure out this number.

[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago

I can definitely see the appeal of being able to do stuff with the information, and I doubt I could sit down and make a list of every game I've ever played. However my memory is pretty good for this sort of thing. It's very rare for me to lose objects as I have a database-like memory for that stuff.

Amusingly this means that if someone else moves things then I'm comedically awful at searching for whatever it was, and if I move house or re-organise then it takes me a few weeks for my brain to record all the new data. Until then I'm a clueless idiot.

Oh and as I said in another comment - time is my nemesis. I often don't know what day of the week it is and anything beyond about a week and a half into the future has almost no meaning to me. It's not a very useful trade-off!

[–] Elevator7009@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I have definitely not played 4,000 games. I tend to stick on a few games till I beat them and then I move on, sometimes returning to replay. I don't have an astounding memory, but if a game is mentioned I'll remember if I played it or not and that is good enough for me. If I forget a good experience, well, that's another opportunity to have it for the "first time", a la that old tumblr post about wanting to be able to selectively erase your memory so you could re-experience your favorite book for the first time.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No. I remember all the games I've played. I can't list them all, however if you were to ask me "hey have you ever played xyz", I would remember if I had or not.

[–] GreyCat@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, the point of such an app would be to have them listed I would guess.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 2 points 1 week ago

Yes. I was just responding to the comment asking if he/she was the only one who remembers if they've played a game.

[–] mohab@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago

Hmm… for me, it's less about memory and more about helping myself see a pattern of what I like and what I don't, which eventually helps me make better purchasing decisions.

Like, when I look at a list of my favorite games, I can conclusively tell you: I like challenging, replayable games with real-time action, synergy among their mechanics, and mechanical variety.

For me, this knowledge would not have been attainable if I didn't sit down and put together a list of what I like/what I don't like.

Me too, but I don't really play a lot of video games, so I could list every game I've ever played pretty quickly.

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[–] lath@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't. If I played a game and then forgot about it, then i get to play it again at a different stage in life. It's a whole new experience! Why would I want to miss out on that?

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[–] sevon@lemmy.kde.social 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I've been using obsidian notes for a lot of things. I have a kanban board there that goes buy->bought->in progress->finished->100%

The last step is pretty useless because I never even want to 100% a game. I should remove it. The main use for the board is so when I haven't played anything in a long time, I can look and go "oh, I had that one going" and pick it up instead of starting some other new game.

[–] pdqcp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I think I'll remove the 100% from mine too, it's been a while since the last time I did it and at one point I stopped enjoying doing it

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 15 points 1 week ago

I don't, my favorite games have a way of leaping out of my memory or my life and latching onto my face to remind me I love them. I guess I forget the others.

[–] Phelpssan@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

I've been using backloggery.com for more than 15 years.

It's a simple, manual site, but I think that's also its main strenght - I've had too many issues with other sites where I wanted to add a niche game I played but it was not in their databases, inconsistent naming between games in the same series, no ability to add duplicates when I occasionally double-diped on a game and so on.

It has all features I need - you can add reviews, notes, track priorities, wishlist, borrowed games, make custom lists, get stats... it's also community supported with no ads.

The site was a bit stale without development for a while, but Drumble (the owner) finished a major rewrite last year and started developing new features again. You can check his profile here for an example.

[–] ItsMeAlex@fedia.io 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I use Questlog and playlists to actually see what I've started/completed/paused/dropped and in which year happened

[–] pienoyer@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Wow! This is almost exactly what I had in mind! Thanks for sharing.

[–] ItsMeAlex@fedia.io 3 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It's a cool open source project by a single dev, present on Mastodon and very receptive about feedbacks :)

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[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I find this post interesting. Are you asking because you're curious about statistical information like "you played this game 28 hours more than that game" or just so you remember if you liked a game or not?

I understand the first one, but I can't even comprehend the second. As soon as I see a screenshot from a game, my brain goes back to playing it and the general emotions it triggers. I might not remember the details about the game, but I'll remember if it was fun, frustrating, boring etc. So I think it's really strange that someone could completely forget playing a game.

I don't mean any offense or anything. I know I'm some kind of neurodivergent, and I find the differences in how we each think very interesting.

[–] pienoyer@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

All good dude! I was mostly wanting to keep an overview for myself so that I could:

  1. Rate the games I played
  2. Add notes/thoughts about the game
  3. See when I played the game and how long it took me to finish it. Those are the three main statistics im interested in. Of course, I generally remember if I have played a game or not, I just like keeping track of things in more detail :)
[–] StargazingDog@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

backloggery.com is your solution.

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago

I've started rating games I finish, or didn't like enough to finish, in backloggd.com

I do the same for movies and tv series on a different website, too.

[–] Futurama@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I've started to use Playnite. It's nice to have a complete catelog of all my games. Most of my real games (ie ignoring random freebies) are on steam, but I've collected a bunch elsewhere like gog, epic, humble bundle, and others. You can give it credentials and set up nearly all the major catelogs so that it can generate a listing of all games you own.

I use it to mark when I completed a game, but I've only had it for a couple years, so I generally go by memory or by steam statistics of hours played.

Downside is that it's Windows only. It's open source and free, and I still have a windows machine for most of my gpu games, but I mainly game on my steam deck or my Linux laptop these days, so I need to find another option or see if Playnite is wine/Proton compatible.

[–] Lfrith@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago

Obsidian is my main notetaking app, so I use the kanban plugin to keep a list of games I'm playing, plan to play, and finished.

[–] voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Some people use categories in their steam library, but it would be nice to have something else to track it all.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah i have 4 categories in steam

  • Beaten - games I have completed
  • want to complete - my real backlog
  • can never complete - for games that don't have a real end like mmos or multi-player only games.
  • Dead Games - for games that no longer work anymore because the publisher shut down the servers. This is a reminder to not buy these kind of games in the future.

I also add non steam games like Playstation and Switch games as shortcuts to a desktop files named after the game that point to nothing. Then add it to the categories to track.

[–] ddash@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

I like the shortcuts workaround!

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[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I use backloggery.com, but I see a lot of people using backloggd.com these days. Backloggery is a bit more old school and relies a lot on manual entry, so I'm sure some of its competitors are better about linking up to things like your Steam account. You can also track a lot of this stuff on HowLongToBeat.com, which is mostly seeking to answer the question in the URL but also lets you log a review of the game, etc.

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[–] N0ll@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago

https://www.backloggery.com/ might be the least modern looking game tracking site, but it’s the only one I found which gives you a yearly breakdown of your started and beat games, that’s way I use it.

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 6 points 1 week ago

Your memory?

[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I've been using Launchbox, especially since I play emulator games. They've improved the efficiency of large libraries and added support for RetroAchievements, although I manually toggle completion status since I don't always use it to launch my games so the time tracker isn't accurate.

More importantly it let's me hit randomize, so if I'm feeling adventurous it'll pull a game from my backlog I might have got from anywhere.

[–] CanadianCorhen@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Basically just my steam lists.

I'm losing track of books, and started tracking them, but games tend to hang around longer, since they take me longer to get through.

[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago

I keep a list in a plain text file. It has sections for each year and one section for games I'm interested in. The list used to be on paper and I'm considering going back to that.

[–] darthelmet@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Not a complete list, but I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the games I bought but then never or barely played to try to get me to revisit them in some organized way. Outside of that, there's just the steam library. Anything further back from my time playing on consoles is kind of just lost to time and memory unless it was a particularly memorable game.

[–] lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

HowLongToBeat.com

Helps me keep track of which games I've played and which games I own on which platform to avoid double-buying.

[–] caut_R@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I have all games I have completed on Steam in Hidden, all games I‘ve never played in its own list and all games I have started in its own list. If I start a game I move it from one list to the other and same when I‘ve finished one. Only works for Steam stuff obviously. But I play 95% of my stuff there so that‘s good enough for me.

[–] MyNameIsAtticus@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Steam is where almost all my games are and i'll have it sorted into a Not Played, Playing, Completed, and 100% category. Recently i've started trying to look into NeoDB though for things i can't add to steam (Like PS3 games)

[–] tdawg@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

If I remember it then it was good enough to remember

[–] Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

At the end of the year I look at the Steam Year in Review overview.

[–] kazerniel@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Obsidian backlinks from my daily notes :) Though I use it more often to track my books, as I mostly play endless live service games 😅

I can sort of use my Steam review date stamps too to track what I played, bc I review the vast majority of games I try.

Edit: and in Steam I put the finished/dropped games in their own categories, but my tag setup there is really extensive, so probably not the best example :) (I have at least 5-6 tags on each of my games.)

[–] TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

I just started a checklist in Joplin, gonna make a new list for each year.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Going forward? RetroAchievements, Steam, GOG, and LaunchBox to tie it all together. PSN trophy integration to LaunchBox would be cool too, because PS3 stuff is never coming to any of those platforms and I have history there, too.

For historical stuff, that's in my memory exclusively.

[–] blomvik@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago

I do the organizing with categories/tags in game libraries that supports it; want to play, playing, beaten, given up, unbeatable.

I also have something similar in Playnite, though I don't love that program.

I also love notebooks, I keep a notebook around for writing in during games, and I set up lists for each year with a column for bought games and one for played games. With this I can see what games I have played since 2016/17 or thereabout.

I love statistics, and seeing when and for how long I played a game is fun.

[–] Stern@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

On Steam I have categories for played, unplayed, playing, and never touching again. Works well, but that backlog is brutal.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

I hear you and if you keep up with the free games from gog epic and prime gaming giveaways. It never stops growing.

[–] reboot6675@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

Just a .txt file on my laptop

I game exclusively in Linux (and I play on GOG and Itch), so I just use Lutris categories for this. Of course, I made a Lutris account and turned on sync

[–] mohab@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I use Gamebrary because it's FOSS, so I suppose you could in theory clone the repo and self-host it, but IDK how self-hosting ready it is.

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