The Ultimate List of a Spreadsheet Database

 

Don't worry, that title's not supposed to make much sense if you try to read it a second time.

Since Thursday, December 19th, Steam has had its annual Winter Sale, which runs through January 2nd.  Also starting on December 19th, the Epic Game Store has had a concurrent sale but also upped their free game to once a day through I believe, also January 2nd when Epic returns to their once-a-week offering.  With this in mind, I entered the Steam Winter Sale with questioning excitement again brought on by the mere existence of the Steam Deck. But, I quickly tempered that excitement by knowing that my Steam backlog was already quite extensive and that I didn't want to double dip and buy a game that might be given away on the Epic Game Store.  With these competing factors in mind, I decided to make a spreadsheet of games that I already had on Steam and Epic.  But then it ballooned and took on a life of its own.

See, it's not just Steam and Epic where I have "digital licenses" for digital games, but also on the Nintendo Switch, Amazon Games, Ubisoft's Uplay (or whatever Ubisoft is calling it these days), GOG  Galaxy, and EA's Origin client.  But trying to remember where I might have one game and where I might have another is an exercise in memory recall that I personally don't possess, so I created "The Ultimate Spreadsheet Database."  And while I started populating cells with the titles of video games, I decided to complicate my life a little more and added a few more columns for wishlisted games because why not at this point?

As I was putting this monstrosity together, there were several unexpected outcomes. The first was that it showed me how many games I already have access to and if I really needed to spend money on even more games.  The second was that I was able to see how many games I already have across multiple platforms, either because of multiple purchases over the years or from acquiring multiple free copies of the same game.  I also think that in some instances, if I had a game on Steam from EA, then it was linked to my EA Origin's account because I am pretty sure that I didn't buy Dead Space 2, Mirror's Edge, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, and Mass Effect 2 on Origin as well as Steam.  Lastly, I thought this might help me clean up my Steam and Nintendo wishlists for games that I already had access to on other platforms.

So this is what this beast of a task looks like now:

The spreadsheet currently sits at 2,482 cells, which was after I added five more games from Prime Gaming which added four games to the GOG column and one to the Amazon Games column.

It is my opinion that that is a stupid amount of games.  Granted there are a lot of titles from the wishlist columns as both my Steam and Nintendo wishlists top 300+ titles, although there are some overlaps in multiple columns. I had also thought about adding in some dynamic color coding, but that became too confusing even for me.  I'm sure that there's additional information I could extrapolate from all of this, but for now it'll be a reminder that I may not need to buy any additional games.

But even with this list and my best efforts, I did buy a couple of games on Steam, which you would likely have noticed if you had read last Friday's article about BIT.TRIP RERUNNER.  With the exception of two games (really five, because the Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a complication of three games and all associated DLC and Divinity: Orignal Sin came packaged with the original version of the game and the enhanced edition), the rest were smaller indie games that I could likely complete in 12 or fewer hours.  I'm not ashamed.

Not really anyway.

I think the real test here will be if I am able to maintain this spreadsheet over the coming days/weeks/years.  It's tempting because I put so much time and effort into manually entering all of this data and that would be the real shame in letting all this go to waste.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

You Have Nothing That I Need

P.S.  I had thought about linking the spreadsheet here to be publically viewable, but that might be in and of itself more shameful because do I really need people to see that I've played Robin Morningwood Adventure Demo - A Gay RPG? (You can look up that one yourself).