Your memory?

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.

My Steam library. I have everything categorized and keep them in a category until I have played and completed them to my satisfaction.

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

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.)

If I remember it then it was good enough to remember

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.

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

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)

I use Obsidian to list the games.

I start using this 3-4years ago, there's a lot of games on "Not started" or "On hold" there are games there I finished but want to replay and there's a lot of older games that I played and didn't add to "Done". In my case is more of games that I bought it and need to be remembered to play it.

Reading comments of people who (hyper-) organize their games as if it's a project to get through and they have to work off. And I'm sitting here just playing whatever the fuck I'm in the mood in.

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.

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.

If it’s Mario kart or balatro I’ve played it if not I haven’t.

HowLongToBeat.com

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

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.

Just a .txt file on my laptop

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.

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.

I personally make a guess depending on certain games as to how long I've played them. I've definitely lost track of how long I've played certain games ( especially on console ) like Borderlands or Sonic Unleashed on xbox360. Especially since I never wrote any of that kinda stuff down in middle/high school because I didn't care how long I had been playing in total.

Though, I will say that I like and dislike how Steam tracks your progress in playing games. I was roughly 4-6 minutes off of playing for 2 hours in order to buy some game related account themes but now I'm 2.7 hours in accoring to them because I ended up leaving it on in the background. In the future, I'm not gonna remember I did that, so I'll assume I actually played all that time. There's no nuance in their monitoring. If the game runs, so does their meter of how long it's been on, regardless of you playing or not.

Though, I assume a good solution would be using any form of note taking program and jotting down your play times and dates and any other notes you want. Or using a spreadsheet with that same information. As long as you don't lose that/those file(s), depending on what solution(s) you choose to take, it should be fine as long as you actually remember to do it and aren't lazy about that, like I would be.

I use Infinitebacklog, which is basically the video games version of what letterboxd is for films or rateyourmusic is for music

I don't intentionally use it to keep track of the games I've played but I've been using GameFAQs to keep track of older console games I have not yet played. It's not perfect for this as I need to use documents to keep track of some additional information but I have yet to find a better alternative.

For PC games, some of the platforms I use, like GOG and Itch, actually have built in features to help me to keep track of what games I haven't played yet. For the others (and mobile) I still have to use documents to keep track of this as well.

I've only played one game since 2005.