Time once again for the much-beloved annual summary of my game-buying habits (now in it’s fifth year!).
During 2011 I added a total of 129 games to my collection, although my choice of words here is arguable, since a whopping 59% of these games were iOS downloads. That’s right – this past year represented by far the smallest amount of retail game purchases I have made in 18 years of keeping figures.
Here are the charts. Let’s start with total games acquired:
That’s 67 iOS games, at an average price of just over $2 apiece. Note I did not include free games in this list (since many of those are quickly deleted never to be looked at again). Note the sliver for the Wii – only 2 games in fact. 2011 is probably the year in which the Wii has died for this player. Note also an unusually high amount of PSP games (18 actually). This is because the system has effectively died, and it was time to ‘fire sale’ a lot of games I had kept my eye on for a while.
This next chart shows the percentage breakdown in terms of dollars spent:
As expected, iOS is a much smaller portion of the pie here. That’s what happens when the margin price is set so low. It’s interesting to note that overall, a far greater percentage of my game-buying (and playing, obviously) has been on portable games (iPad, DS, PSP, 3DS). This is not that unusual – I’ve always been a big fan of portable systems – but it was helped last year by the fact I spent large portions of the year working on my dissertation and simply didn’t have the time to sit down and devote myself to a console game. Which would have been PS3 only, given how the Wii died and I don’t have an XBox 360.
In total, I spent $1545 on games last year, a slight increase from 2010 but still well below the high-$2000’s from a decade ago. Do I play less games? No I don’t (the total number of purchases is higher than a decade ago), I just play cheaper ones 🙂
The best game of the year? Well I’ll have to give two awards here – one for iOS and one for retail. The best iOS award would go to…
The above game owned my life for a few weeks in the same way it’s predecessor Llamatron did back in 1991. Jeff Minter has iOS by the horns right now (geddit!) and I’m a happy man about that 🙂
As for non-download games, this guy here gets my nod:
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for PSP. Yes, another re-release. I still own the (now very expensive and collectable) PS1 version and played it to death, so I had wondered if there was much interest for me in the PSP update. Well yes Robert, there was. As in 200 hours of it! A must-buy if you like tactics games and have a PSP. (This game also inspired one this years more unusual blog posts)
Note that I did get an (as yet unplayed) new Monster Hunter game for Christmas (portable 3rd), so the broken streak of games-of-the-year will probably return in 2012 🙂
