It really depends on what counts as a "backlog". I am not a completionist. WIth most games, 100%ing a game would be too tedious and repetitive. When I had my fill of a game, I had my fill. I'll platinum something like a Heavy Rain because it's a reasonable 100%. One playthrough alone is quite short as it is. So it wasn't a big deal for me to go for 100%. Especially when I was motivated to experience all the different routes. But have you seen some of these acheivements/trophies for RPGs? Are you kidding me? I'm not going to burn hundreds of hours on tedious achievements/trophies when I feel like moving on to something else.
Especially now that I have a rental subscription and have lots of rentals at my fingertips and I don't have as much free time as I used to, I'm not that hung up about completionism anymore. I've got a lot of games on my wishlist at the moment. In terms of older games alone, I still haven't got to Crackdown 2, Deadly Premonition (game looks hilarious), Naughty Bear (apparently it sucks but the concept is interesting so I'm going to rent it), Earth Defense Force 2017 (plenty of peeps swear by it), FF13, Infamous, Yakuza 3, Shiren the Wanderer, Another Code R (just homebrewed my Wii! Now I can finally play region-locked games), Last Window and a bunch of PSP and DS RPGs. And of course the latest shit too. Not gonna bother listing that off.
I can understand the mentality of wanting to get bang for your buck. I often feel guilty about how much I've spent on videogames. Though when I think back to how much my similar-aged peers blow on entertainment, cell phone bills, etc. it's really not bad. I am trying to cut back though because I figure that I may be a tad obsessive (or not. lol). Next gen I might not get as much hardware. I've already been thinking about skipping over the 3DS because honestly while having access to all the hardware is nice, it's not really necessary to have fun. And having less hardware would make it easier to stay within my self-imposed 14 hours/week limit (I feel like I need to limit myself so that I don't sacrifice a social life and productivity). Though when I see fellow male gamers in RL going to GameStop to Day 1 shit all the time and then trading stuff back at half value AND on top of that they have huge cell phone bills and what not, I feel a lot less guilty. lol. (Not that there is anything wrong with doing all that. People are pretty much free to do what they want with their money)
An acquaintance of mine said (I don't consider him a friend) I must be rich because I own multiple consoles but I bet he still spends more on videogames than I do despite playing a whole lot less games than I do becaue he buys everything (whereas I rent the majority and buy less) and is a pre-orderer/Day 1er for just about every game he buys. Maybe I just need to stop associating with judgmental douchebags like that acquaintance.
