How do you organize your steam library?

[maxwellyoung]

In steam there is an option to set catergories for the games in your library.

Do you use this and if so how do you organize your collection?

By genre? By completion?

 

This is mine.

∞ = Neverending

✓ = Completed

✗ = Incomplete

-  = Completing

O = Open World (Which I want to keep playing like AC, Skyrim or Just Cause)

[Twig]

Haha wow I never considered using non-ASCII characters. That's great. Anyway mine is embarrassing but here you go:

 

 

I have since categorized THOSE games but have also accumulated dozens of others...

[Badfinger]

Favorites

 

Games

[BusbyBerkeley]

Can you tag games into multiple categories yet? And can you do batch tagging? I used to have mine organized by multiplayer, completed, currently playing, etc but It was a hassle and I switched to Favorites and Games, and now I don't have any tagged favorites and just list installed games and type in the first few characters of what I want to play. I'd love to have it organized, but it was a huge pain to manually change them one by one and have to come up with vague but still useful sorting methods. I want a folder of local multi games, then also local coop, local vs, etc, while still having them tagged as multiplayer because most of them have online multi anyway.

[Twig]

Yes and yes to your two questions. You can shift click to select multiple at a time, and multiple categories are now supported. Or is it ctrl click. Or is it both.

[BusbyBerkeley]

Troll2_OhMyGod.mp4

[Smart Jason]

All I ever do is prune my Installed list and let my Games list sit wild and invisible in the background. However, I'd love it if Steam would incorporate this sort of thing for the Wishlist, because that I actually do have a sort of system for (since you ask, my list is subdivided into three categories in descending order: Games I've Never Played Which I Eagerly Want, Games I've Played And Enjoyed Elsewhere Which I'll Eventually Repurchase On Steam, Games I've Never Played And Have Reservations About But Which I'm Still Interested In For The Right Price, and titles are organized within those categories by preference; I used to also add genre to this as well, but it was a mess).

 

Which isn't to say I'm lax in my organization otherwise, because I am a man who knows how to Google Drive:

 

[Justin Leego]

Maxwell you genius

[juv3nal]

I don't have a ton of space on my main drive (and I tend to keep data stuff on the external, but actual programs like games on the main drive which is an ssd), so I tend to lump all uninstalled ones together into an 'archive' category and forget about them. The only non installed ones that get a different category are things in early access that I have no intention of checking out until they are out of early access.

 

I do vaguely categorize the installed ones by genre, but there are only 15 of them at the moment so it's not like it's hugely important.

[Spenny]

 

A On Deck: Installed.

Beaten: Beaten.

Played: It had its chance.

Uninstalled MP: It could be installed again, if I had friends to play it with.

Unplayed: I haven't even bothered to install.

Games: I haven't even bothered to categorize, there's only 1 in there right now.

[elmuerte]

Posted today in #IdleThumbs

 

20:13 < elmuerte> instead of adding new dumb features Valve should fix the problems with Steam
20:13 < elmuerte> like the library
20:14 < elmuerte> but with 750+ games that's just a lot of work, and browsing your library is out of the question
20:14 < elmuerte> can't sort on any metadata like "date added"
20:14 < elmuerte> or browse via categories from the store

 

I have 4 categories:

- completed

- quitted

- uncompleted

- uncategorized

 

I don't double tag.

[Dewar]

I install everything as I first buy it and then uninstall as I beat or quit. That's the advantage of having a 6tb RAID in my desktop.

 

Now that I've started buying games for 4 player local multiplayer parties, I've made a category for those. The experience has been acceptable, so I might do a few more. Also, I keep an Excel sheet of all the games I've bought and/or beaten this year, so that helps with organization as well.

[elmuerte]

6TB RAID SSD sounds expensive

[sclpls]

Favorites

First Person

Immersive Sims

Life Sims

Platformers

RPGs

Multiplayer

Post-Soviet Apocalypse

RTS

Strategy

Tactics

Worms

Games

 

I think that's everything...

[Bjorn]

[SecretAsianMan]

I install everything as I first buy it and then uninstall as I beat or quit. That's the advantage of having a 6tb RAID in my desktop.

 

Completely off topic question: Which RAID level do you use?

[Tanukitsune]

I don't really organize my Steam Library per se, but my unbeaten Steam games that I actually intend to beat are on my desktop. It's a good way to actually see how big your backlog is.

[Dewar]

Completely off topic question: Which RAID level do you use?

 

RAID 5 with 3x 3tb hybrid drives. In theory having the RAID should offset the fact that I'm not running SSD, but it's definitely not as fast as I'd like. Also, it crashes occasionally *shrug* It's still nice to not have to worry about managing my installs or moving software back and forth between an SSD and a larger HDD, but I probably would make a different decision if buying today, especially as 1tb SSDs become more common.

[SecretAsianMan]

I used to run a RAID 5 as well but it kept failing on me.  I've been considering building it again with a RAID 10.  I still have the HDDs.

[Mangela Lansbury]

I organized my steam library once then something happened and it all went away so now I do a lot of scrolling

[Bjorn]

Steam categories were really, really wonky for awhile, including total resets.  But it seems to have stabilized a bunch in the last few months. 

[eot]

I basically don't. If there's something I'm playing I add it to favourites while I'm playing it, then remove it and I only show favourites.

 

However, I recently started making a category for finished games just to get an idea of what proportion of games I've yet to go through. If you could drag and drop into categories I might use it more, but the RMB->set category is too clunky.

[Dewar]

Agreed on the drag-and-drop.

[Thrik]

I'd probably end up spending more time organising games than actually playing them if I started, so I just roll a nice alphabetical list which I can't say is ever anything less than 100% efficient unless I somehow don't know what the game I want to play is called.

[Cbirdsong]

I have Favorites, which is everything I might play soon, and Local Multi, since you can browse by category in Big Picture mode. Everything else is one big pile. The library management is anemic, but it's still way better than the console storefronts, which is mind-boggling. On there, you have to really dig to find the big list of digital games you own. (I don't know if this situation has improved much on the new consoles)