Do you keep all of your Steam games installed? I try to and this is why I have a total of 26TB of storage, a combination of hard drives and solid-state drives, available on my Personal Computer. With access to 6,200+ Steam games however, you know that even that amount of storage is just not enough. So, I keep all the games that I have installed because I want to be able to play them immediately when I feel like it, but I don't automatically install all of the games that I just got from the Steam store. And we are only talking about Steam games here. I also have a multitude of other gaming clients on my PC, like Epic Games or the EA App and I got plenty of games there installed as well. Is there a reason to keep games installed on your PC outside of having the convenience of their ready to play state? With Internet speed getting faster and faster as the years go by, maybe this situation is not as complex as it initially seems.
I have ONLY about 27% of my Steam library installed and ready to play.
Now, if you are like me though and enjoy installing a lot of Steam games at a time and leaving the client running all the time (I would only close out Steam completely when playing games on other PC clients), you know that Steam games get updated all the time. Most of the time, it's not even a developer update but whatever Steam's very own small checks or fixes that would cover a whole selection of games at a time. Sure, you can program all of your Steam games to only update when you launch them but then that may lead to a horrible wait time when you are actually in the mood to play these games. So, I opted to just update my games every singe time I see them available on the download page. This became a much more difficult and harrowing process
a couple of years back when my Internet was pure $h!t - and darn it, time goes by ridiculously fast! With unlimited Internet though, I get to just waste bandwidth on games that I probably won't touch anytime soon. This becomes a daily grind for me, like a daily puzzle game that I have to participate in to ensure that I am not left behind in gaining progress. I would drag and drop the game banners in the download page and stack them up from the smallest to the biggest patch, which despite its repetitive, simple process just feels strangely soothing for me.
I spend a lot of time on this Steam page.
And I would repeat these two or three times every single day - perhaps even more frequently sometimes. There has never been a day when the download queue is left empty. There are always a number of games that needed an update and after I have been doing this for a long time, I started noticing games that are being babied by their developers, as they would often show up multiple times a day and are constantly in need of some sort of update, all the way to games that are so badly put together that installing even a minor patch to them would take ages to complete. Video games for me is not just that process of playing them for fun, but also managing their presence conscientiously. Should it be, though? Granted, I'm purposely installing myself into the Steam updates when it should be more of a background process. But this is also because Steam allows you to customize the experience unlike the automatic updates found in other PC clients. I suppose there is still a part of me that is fearful that I somehow may not be able to get to my digital games in the future and that is why it is hard for me to get rid of them when I am not actually playing them. Just recently, I was thinking of further upgrading the storage size on my PC but I know that it's time to stop and take a different approach to this. You can't take it with you, as the saying goes, and I'm acting like these things are permanent when we ourselves as human beings are definitely not. I'm putting things into perspective and the more I do that, the happier I become with all the little things I am doing with my gaming life, however insignificant: like update whoring.
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