My digital Xbox One gaming library would be taller than my house

I’m just about to finish the two year run of paying for my Xbox Series X. I was lucky enough to get the deal that saw you pay monthly with Game Pass Ultimate included and therefore provided me with a constant supply of games, online connectivity and all the joys they bring.

My thought process most recently of course has been to collect physical games and specifically retro games. But the way that digital distribution works, and the changing of ownership of certain franchises has led me to consider my own library of games and what I consider to “need” in some way that I don’t feel too aggrieved if it disappears from my console.

I’ve probably got about 30-40 games physically for my Xbox One/Series console, which mostly consists of racing franchises like the F1, GRID, Project Cars and Forza franchises that I’ve recently been picking up. Many of which have titles that are now no longer available to purchase digitally (although digitally owned titles are still easily downloaded - that part hasn’t changed yet). So in some way, as a collector primarily of racing games, I’m still holding true to that focus.

And there is the element that working as a journalist in the industry means having codes redeemed and I’m a bit of a sales nut when it comes to picking things up on digital stores. That in mind, combined with a good 8 years at least of owning the console and the 7 years before that of Xbox 360 purchases, means I have 547 games that I “own”. Add on Game Pass, the years of Games with Gold redemption and other available services in Game Pass Ultimate (not counting PC) and I stand at 1,171 games I can install and play right now.

I mean… It’s a bit excessive, right? If I had those all physically and I stacked them up, that’d be a 12 meter high pile. The average UK house (two story semi detached) is around 5 meters high. The stack would be as high as two houses on top of one another. Even the 547 I actually “own” would be around 6 meters.

It goes without saying that there’s absolutely no way that I’ve played all of them… Maybe started at least the majority of them up at least once. And this is just Xbox, that’s not even including Switch, Playstation and the shelf load of stuff behind me as I write this. Exactly how long would it take me to even make a significant dent in that?

That’s an open question, I have absolutely no idea. Easily months, very likely years. I’m not sure I want to know. I certainly don’t have that amount of time unless I retire tomorrow, and even then if that were possible, I’d like to go outside for a pint at least.

But I look at that list and the games and I do struggle to work out what to play. The lack of time would suggest that I should want to play games with very modular stories that I can consume as and when, saving often, supporting short bursts. My brain wants to spend time getting into grand strategies or large building sims. My heart wants to plug in every old console I have and import all the Japanese train sims.

Which made a revelation earlier this week all the more all the more confusing. I had played a grand total of 460 hours. Yet 142 hours, so a good 30% of that time was playing LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga - a game that I admittedly said to many was “quite dull” and “had lost what made the originals so good - comedic takes on the story of Star Wars - in favour of forcing multiple world hubs with little to do in them.” Sorry, TT Games, you’re great really.

Why did I spend so long completing it? Other than the fact that it can take quite a while to complete everything because of just how big the hub system is (86 hours is roughly the time on average), I obviously took my sweet time about it. So why did I carry on when I obviously wasn’t enjoying it? Was it that I could dip in and out easily, play small chunks here and there? No, it wasn't.

It was Stubbornness. Pure Stubbornness. I started, I got so far and thus I was going to finish and get those trophies. A cool 1000 gamerscore and trophies to help garner those Reward Points for discounts. Instead of really playing the game I was meta gaming the game to play the meta game behind it to get rewarded. It's the second newsletter in a row where I’ve been a willing, aware and complicit victim of flow.

So, back to the point - If I don’t have enough time to play the games that I have digitally which don’t take up space, why am I purchasing them physically where I don’t have the space? It's stubbornness. Pure… No, wait, I’ve done that one.

Well, it is partly that, but also an interest in preservation. I want to personally have access to these games. They form a big part of the history of modern racing gaming which I curate for my own personal joy. Given license expiry's, developer acquisistions and other factors, meaning that a lot have been withdrawn from sale digitally, these are games I want to hand or on a shelf to show off (we all want something to show off in truth).

There’s a comfort in knowing they are there and, even now in this digital age where loading a game from a disc takes an hour of install time, that they are there to be played still makes me happy.

And yet, right now, these are not the games I want to play. I want to spend an age building a railway empire, govern the islands of Tropico, sail the seas in Port Royale or Pirates, conquer the deserts of Dune and rule the known space in Stellaris.

Times change and tastes change. My love for racing games will remain, although I’m not going to threaten any leaderboards any time soon. My love for retro will also remain, as nostalgia and challenge is a big part of my gaming personality (for want of a better descriptor). But the challenge of building, maintaining and developing stirs my creative energies a lot more than anything else right now. So what exactly do I need?

Maybe a list? Maybe a suggestion? Maybe I need to be told what to play? Or maybe I should just do what makes me happy. So I’ll lie on the sofa and watch some cooking shows whilst scouring the sales online for more things I won’t have time to play. Stubbornness, hey?