Downloading games, installing mods, setting up emulators, and organizing your library – it’s easy to spend hours tinkering with a Steam Deck without actually playing anything. This is exactly what happened to the Reddit user u/Adsary46. He had accumulated about 3TB of games on his SSD and memory card, but had never finished a single story-driven game from start to finish.
Apparently most of his time is spent experimenting and organizing. Although he started many games, he quickly lost interest and moved on to the next one. After all, there were more than enough of them installed. Then, one day, he says he accidentally deleted the entire installation. Instead of painstakingly rebuilding his collection, he removed the memory card and installed exactly one game from the Steam store: Portal 2. He had picked up the classic puzzle at a sale some time ago. Thanks to a cloud save, he was able to return immediately after the tutorial.
The urge to move on to something else whenever boredom began to overwhelm was still there. This time, however, there was nothing else installed. So he continued, took his time and finally finished Portal 2. According to the Reddit user, he had never had so much fun with his Steam Deck. Going forward, he’s considering focusing on one game at a time and creating a separate category for completed titles.
Other solutions that don’t involve deleting everything
Many commentators recognize the same pattern in their own gaming habits. However, there are other ways to limit the huge number of choices and spend more time playing games, without having to delete an entire collection. We’ve already talked about a Steam Deck user who came up with a simple strategy for this very problem. He creates a Steam library of 5 to 30 games he really wants to play and sorts them by “Last Played.” If nothing immediately catches his interest, he scrolls down the list and chooses the last item at the latest. More details on his approach can be found in our article on the trick to overcoming choice paralysis (in German). Incidentally, there is also a game on Steam dedicated to this very phenomenon.
As a child in the 90s, my Gameboy was my constant companion. After school, the PlayStation turned on. When I finally got my first PC, I was completely hooked. Since then my passion for video games has never waned. For me, writing for Notebookcheck means reporting on topics that are really close to my heart: in addition to games, I also like to write about electric mobility, photovoltaics and innovative gadgets. When I’m not sitting at the computer, I’m probably on water rescue duty on the Baltic coast or trying to counteract the downsides of my geek life of sitting for long periods at the local swimming pool.
