What I learned from the 106 games I played this year

Polygon’s Editor’s Letter is a column from Editor-in-Chief Chris Plante that reflects on the video game and entertainment industries, their communities, and Polygon itself. New editions appear in the first week of each month.

One of my more neurotic habits is maintaining a spreadsheet that tracks my media diet. Every movie, TV show, comic, sports match, Japanese study session, podcast, and of course video game gets clocked in 15-minute increments. Each day. 365 days a year.

Time tracking allows me to analyze where and how I prioritize my time. This year, for example, I played a lot of video games — 106, to be precise.

Scanning the spreadsheet, gaming demanded more of my time than any other media — by far. This was intentional. I wanted to keep up with video games in a year of endless new releases. So why does it feel like I missed out?

For this month’s Editor’s Letter, I’ll share my takeaways from a year of drinking directly from the hose. And I’ll hopefully make sense of my lingering FOMO along the way.

Some of what follows will read like the delirious blather of someone paid to, on some level, play video games for a living. But I hope most of my reaction is relatable. Because with services like Game Pass, an abundance of high-quality free-to-play games, and sales seemingly every other week, the challenge for most people isn’t access to games, but deciding what to play.

Or, to put it another way: Everyone’s a game critic now.

I’ve written elsewhere about gaming’s current era of abundance, in which each week a dump truck unloads dozens of new releases, burying the previous week’s haul in the process. Despite the Sisyphean nature of this endeavor, I’ve tried my damndest to keep up and have spent most of the year scrounging through the ever-growing heap.

Of the 106 games I played in 2024, 95 were released between January and today. The cost of that decision is obvious when you flip the numbers. In 2024 I played only 11 “old” games. Like anybody else, I have a backlog that mocks me every time I open Steam. I’d love to play more of those games someday, but making time to play old games means missing out on new releases, which in turn grows my backlog.

A decade ago, playing 95 new games in a year meant I’d have played every important release, every mildly interesting experiment, and still made room for a few real stinkers. Today, it’s possible I didn’t play your favorite game of the year.

Here are some of the games I didn’t play in 2024 that I sincerely wanted to try but for whatever reason didn’t make the time for: Deadlock, Satisfactory, Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Sand Land, Planet Coaster 2, Core Keeper, Smite 2, Chained Together, The Outlast Trials, and Persona 3 Reload.

And what of living games like Fortnite and Final Fantasy 14? No way. These are the sorts of games that, if I played them, would consume every moment of my game time. And so, of the top 10 most-played games on Steam, in 2024, I only played one.

You might be aghast. How could the person running Polygon skip some of the most important games in the world? I argue that my experience is a clear justification for Polygon’s existence. Even someone paid, in part, to have an obsessive understanding of video game culture can’t play everything.

For the average person, a mix of websites, videos, streams, and podcasts will fill in the gaps. So even if I haven’t played your favorite games, I’ve probably read, watched, or heard something about them.

Honestly, I’m exhausted just looking at the list of games I played, which I’ve included in the comments. Trying to keep up with the game du jour (more like du jouer, am I right?) is expensive, time-consuming, and often demands jettisoning one game I’m enjoying to make room for another. As I approach the finish line of my annual marathon, I have a renewed appreciation (jealousy?) for people who opt out of playing the new cool thing, instead committing to one, two, or three games that consume the bulk of their time.

As I wrote in a previous Editor’s Letter:

According to a report from Newzoo, in 2023 players spent 77% of their playtime on games three years or older. Much of the time players spent on new games went to annualized franchises, like Call of Duty, Madden, and EA FC. A paltry 8% of overall playtime in 2023 went to new games not tied to big, yearly IP.

I suspect those stats held true in 2024. Committing to established, particularly free-to-play living games costs far less than a subscription service, let alone new games each week. These games provide constant updates to keep rewarding the time investment. Their familiar loop requires less of their players’ brains, freeing up those players’ mental load to be social with friends on Discord while they play.

If you play games as a social activity or a stress relief valve, a few familiar games might be all you need.

Even with everything I’ve written in mind, I wouldn’t have gone about 2024 differently.

Hell, as happy as I am to have a slowish December, I’m already looking forward to January, when Steam releases will inevitably ramp back up and my free time will be reclaimed by indie games I’d never heard about until the moment they appear under New & Noteworthy.

Because, if you’ll afford me some seasonal saccharine sincerity, this is what childhood me hoped games would become.

The variety of games released this year is unmatched compared to the medium’s contemporaries, like film and television. This year, you may play thousands of hours of some of the best role-playing games ever made. Or perhaps you refined your taste in roguelikes like a sommelier honing their palate. You could have flown a perfect re-creation of a commercial jet from Hong Kong to New York, raced in the Monaco Grand Prix, or won MVP at the Super Bowl.

In 2024, I played a remake of a game from the 1980s, a pastiche of a game from the 1990s, and a deconstruction of the shooters of the early 2020s. One game turned my Windows OS into a bullet hell. Another gave a squirrel a gun. Games questioned the fundamentals of democracy, the unexamined grief of a pandemic, and the abject joy of stealing a shopping cart and gunning down a hill.

Even if I didn’t have this job, I’d still have this gaming diet. Because I find the greatest pleasure in the possibilities. How fortunate we are to experience video games at this moment when there’s something for everyone. Whether that’s enjoying one game all year or a hundred. And six. And counting.

I wrote earlier that I hoped to gift y’all with a universal takeaway. And here it is. What I learned from playing an absurd amount of video games over the last 12 months:

Whether it’s video games or any other hobby, it’s tempting to look back at how we spent a year and consider everything we could have done instead. To dwell on the gap between our ambitions and our accomplishments. Don’t dwell on what you missed; grow from what you experienced.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from tracking my life in a spreadsheet, it’s that there’s never enough time.