Robot Claw

2010 was a shocking year in one respect: my game collection. The pie charts don’t lie, so here they are…

The above shows total game purchases during the year, broken by percentage. I only got 75 games in total during 2010 – a drop of about 25% from the previous year. Of that total the largest amount was 40 games for the DS. Many of the games for PS3 (28 total) were games downloaded from PSN (and not retail games).

There is the breakdown by cost. You can see PS3 edged out DS by a little, mostly because the retail games are about twice as much. The total dollars spent was almost a 50% reduction on 2009, and in fact was one of the lowest for any year since I started keeping records (1993). I spent a little less than $1300 on my gaming hobby during 2010.

In short: 2010 was a relatively inexpensive year for me as far as game buying was concerned.

The factors? I can think of a few:
– Cheap downloaded games (I rarely buy PSN games costing more than $5)
– Less time to play games, due to me being busier teaching than in previous years
– I spent an inordinate amount of time playing just three games. In fact, gameplay on these titles equals about 7% of my life during 2010, which means it would have been a much larger percentage of the time spent actually playing games (I estimate 50%)

I suppose I should start tracking iOS games as well, and had I done that this year there would have been maybe $20 spent in total.

And so we get to my ‘game of the year’ award. It’s not as obvious as it perhaps could be, but after some deliberation I would have to say this guy wins:

Monster Hunter Tri is a beast of a game, made by men for men. Playing this game is like spending time in the world as it should be.

And in 2010 I spent hundreds of hours in that world 🙂