Uninstalling Games
I’ve recently started reclaiming space on my hard drive and have subsequently started a gaming purge. Contemporary games are often very large and it doesn’t take long for a few titles to monopolise your storage capacity. As fickle gamers we can fall out of love with a game very quickly making these large client installations redundant. It’s a curious thing but the entire process of removing a game from your PC is quite therapeutic. It can be similar to bidding a fond farewell to a dear friend, or wiping some offending matter from the sole of your shoe. It all comes down to how you feel about the game in question.
At present I have seventy eight games linked to my Steam account and a further dozen that run independently or via other platforms such as origin or Uplay. Yet out of those one hundred titles I currently have just seven installed. The only one that I’m actively playing at present is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, although I do check in once a week with LOTRO, STO and Guild Wars 2. It seems quite ironic that despite having a substantial collection of content to draw upon, very little of it is actually being used. I’ll probably never play at least half of the games that I have.
I guess this cavalier attitude reflects a broader change in gaming. Apart from pre-ordering and earlier adoption, gaming is no longer the premium priced pastime that it use to be. The vast majority of my gaming library is made up of titles that have been bought as discount bundles. Pricing does affect how a product is perceived and cheap games do smack of disposable items. A £75 pound investment usually garners some perseverance. A £2 pound game that fails to engage is given short thrift. My Steam library is somewhat akin to my sock draw, populated mainly by cheap and easily replaceable items.
I’ve reclaimed about two hundred gigabytes of disk space by uninstalling these games. As I stated earlier this has been more of a psychological exercise in “house cleaning” rather than a genuine search for more storage. It’s not as if hard drives are especially expensive these days. What remains to be seen is whether I replace these games with other discount titles that I won’t play over the remainder of the year. I suspect that I’ll be conducting this process again in spring.