Hi, like everybody I was a little bit too enthousiast about these sales so I got too much games. I would like to manage my backlog of games (gog, steam, physical, etc.) to see what I can play when I have some time.
I checked on the forum and got 2 answers : backloggery and http://howlongtobeat.com/ where you can put your collection and see what you have finished and what you still have to do (and how much time it could take).
That's cool but it's not what I am exactly looking for : a list of my games organised by category (genre)

When I want to play a game I usually think about what kind of game and then choose in the remaining games of my list. I use to do that in steam because there all of my games are categorized and it's very efficient and easy to display only one genre.
Now I have too many games on too many platforms (gog, steam, uplay, origin, physical, consoles, etc.) to be able to really know what I have...
Finally is there a better tool than a spreadsheet for that?

Play what interests you first.

The other day when I felt nostalgic about my NDS. I went through a list of titles to find that most of them were sh!t years after. I just could not bring myself to waste a single moment on half the titles I have because of how utterly stupid they were.

So try a bunch at random and if nothing catches your interest, just move on. You weren't ready for them, or they just suck and you wasted you cash lol

I use Darkadia where they offer filters such as Playing, Played, Completed as catagories but also your typical genre like action, RPG or strategy. There's also one for platforms. There's also 3 custom tags as a noraml user but if you pay as a Pro user you get unlimited I believe.

The problem is if you have many games it will take some time to add them. I suggest doing them in chunks like perhaps 50 a day or so, I did that for a week and it wasn't too much trouble.

Manage my backlog!? Every time during this sale I've clicked on a game to buy it I found out, much to my bewilderment, that I already had it! :P

You didn't notice the "buy now" button instead saying "owned" before you clicked on it?

I use two different methods but they're quite work intensive because I'm rather picky.

1. For maintaining my collection, I use , which offers nice GUIs [url=http://www.photoshop-cafe.de/bildupload/pics/sonst/1298150633_GCStar.jpg]similar to GOG's shelf and is very flexible when it comes to customization. It also comes with templates for various kinds of media, and templates for videogames can fetch data from web libraries. The downside is that last I checked these scripts weren't checking the libraries I'd have preferred (GiantBomb, Mobygames). You can write your own scripts for that, but I didn't want to learn how to do it and I didn't want to rely on incomplete databases, so I did everything manually. Which means my library is now exactly what I was looking for and allows me to sort games by all kinds of categories, year, genre, personal score, priority, progress, tags, whatever I want to (and whatever I defined and filled out). But it also was a huge pile of work with a collection as big as mine, and another downside is that while the program is generally stable and useful, there still are some minor bugs and annoyances that probably won't be fixed anymore as I read they stopped support for Windows.

2. For keeping an overview of installed games, I use Win 8's metro screen in combination with the awesome OblyTiles. I know that a lot of users hate the metro screen of Win 8 and would rather get rid of it, but for me it's one of the few features of Win 8 that I actually like, even if I don't quite use it as intended (no apps, no connection with Microsoft acount). For me it's just a bigger and enhanced space for displaying and sorting shortcuts for my games so the desktop doesn't get cluttered. I make my own tiles, arrange them by genre and use bigger tiles for the ones I'm actively playing at the moment. Also quite work intensive, but fun and rewarding (for an example, see attached image).

I'm very happy with these two solutions, but like I said, they're not for everyone, as they require investing quite a bit of time and work (you'd have to be really passionate and frankly, quite nuts), and of course, the second option is only available to users of Win 8 (unless there are free programs to simulate some kind of metro screen for other OS, I think I've seen that somewhere).

Very wise but... you have to know what you have first ;) Actually I rediscover my collection, so many gem I didn't even try! I checked Darkadia, it could be a very good solution, looks very good indeed thanks! This normal/pro thing could mean it's not a community project but more business so it could eventually "die" and make you lose your database ? Maybe I'm just paranoid for nothing. It happened to me twice, so that's why maybe it could be useful in the end ^^ The owned button doesn't appear if you own it somewhere else ;)
By the way in french it's not that obvious because "buy now" is "achetez" and "owned" is translated here "acheté" (it should be "possédé") 1. Waw... I didn't expect to find a free open source software, that's awesome! I'm gonna spend some time to see how it really works but their website links to other interesting alternatives... I'm gonna waste more time on this than actually playing but finally these applications can help to manage other collection (movies, books, wines...)
Many thanks for this!
2. I love tidy desktop and your solution looks sexy! I would eventually try one day if I am brave enough. For the moment I ignore totally the metro screen, 8.1 allow me to do that (start and turn off on the good old desktop) so i don't even really know how it works.
At least congratulation for your hard work, for me it's totally worth it and impressive!

Actually, it's not that hard, you just delete or hide all the existing tiles on the metro screen that you don't want to see. Then you right-click on a desktop shortcut, select "Attach to Start" (or whatever it's called in French) which will create a (nondescript) tile for your desktop shortcut on the metro screen. Then you just start the OblyTiles program from your desktop and customize the tile by loading a fitting image, and that's it. The actual work is mostly in finding and cropping a good image for your shortcut (the size doesn't matter but it has to be square). If you decide to try this option one day and you want to save yourself some time and work, I'd be perfectly fine with sharing the tiles I've created; chances are I've already made some for games you own, too.

True. It has not worried me really because I keep track of my gaming habits out of curiousity and fun, not necessity. You could always send an e-mail in case he's planning or could add a feature that lets you extract your own database.

I use (and built!) http://www.completionator.com/. I think it might be close to what you're looking for. Its main goals are to provide a way to efficiently manage your collection (for the collectors out there) and to manage your backlog (for the gamers out there). And if you're like me, you're both of those!

Once you have games in your collection, you can tag them and / or place them on lists to organize however you want. You can also specify the digital provider (Steam, GOG, Desura, etc) so you know where you purchased it from. These are also filters, so finding a game should be pretty easy.

If you use Steam, you can import your games right in, so you don't have to manually load those. Unfortunately, I do not have an automated import for GOG right now. I know, I know, it's at the top of my list, but I keep holding out for Galaxy in hopes of an API...

And if you check it out and have any feedback, let me know!

Mrkgnao's MaGoG supports importing GOG's library through copy paste, maybe he could help you adding said option, even if it's not automatic.

Wait, you built it? First impressions are very good and I like the idea of loading a library. I'll check it out.

I tried to import my Steam library but first I received an error, most likely because I had it at Private and I apparently added my ID plus /. I deleted the / and changed it to Public, now I don't even get an error and after the loading disappears nothing happens.

Yep, I've been working on it for a while now as a hobby project. I finally managed to release it last year :D

I tested your issue in my development environment and I know exactly what's happening. When I try to look up a user's Steam library, I either use the auto-generated ID that Steam provides or the custom name you can enter on your Steam profile. If I detect a number, I assume it's an auto-generated ID. In your case, you have a number, but it's actually a custom name, so it's trying to do the wrong look-up.

I should be able to fix it pretty easily though and then I'll push out an update. Give me a few minutes here and I'll reply when it's ready :) Oh and if you're using the site right now, it might be unresponsive for a few seconds when I push out the fix.

Great!

Just a quick question, I noticed if you change a game into "completion" section you can fill out notes about games but not without doing that. If not, could you had a note section that doesn't require completion?

Okay, it should be fixed now, sorry about that! It worked fine for me in my dev environment, but let me know if you have any other problems with it.

Regarding the notes, yeah, you can add one to a game in your collection without having a completion. If you're looking at your collection, there should be a little icon on the far right, underneath the "Now Playing", "Backlogged", "Hidden", and "Strategy Guide" buttons. If you hover over that, it will display your note, if you have one. In either case, you can click on the icon to get a popup where you can enter it. If you have a note entered on a game, the icon should be colored green so you can find them easily.

Also, if you utilize the playthroughs feature, which lets you enter time as you play through a game and ultimately enter a completion, you can enter a note specific to the playthrough that's separate from everything else. So you end up with having 3 different places for notes: 1) a game within your collection; 2) a playthrough; 3) a completion.