Your Games Are in Ten Places: How to Actually Organize a Backlog

The reason a backlog feels unmanageable is not that you own too many games. It is that you do not have one backlog. You have a Steam backlog, an Epic backlog, a PlayStation backlog, an Xbox backlog, a Nintendo backlog, and a few smaller ones — and none of them talk to each other. Every time you go looking for something to play, you are searching ten lists instead of one.

Organization, then, is mostly a problem of consolidation before it is a problem of sorting. Get your games into a single view first; everything else is easier once you can see them all.

Step 1 — Get one view

If your library is spread across PC launchers, a cross-store client does the heavy lifting. GOG Galaxy, for example, imports libraries from Steam, Epic, and Ubisoft, and can link Xbox and PlayStation accounts, so the games you own on each appear in one scrollable list. It is not perfect — some platforms expose more than others — but it removes the daily “which launcher was that in” tax.

If you play across consoles and PC, a dedicated tracker is the more complete answer. Backloggd lets you add any game by hand and tag it with the platform you own or play it on, so a Switch cartridge, a Steam purchase, and a Game Pass loaner all sit side by side. You build it up in small batches — ten or twenty titles a session — and it becomes genuinely useful the moment your whole owned-and-unplayed pile is in one place.

The point of either approach is the same: stop treating “what should I play” as a storefront navigation problem.

Step 2 — Use what the storefronts already give you

Each client has organization features that most people never touch. They are worth learning because they are free and they live exactly where you buy and launch games.

• Steam — Collections. Right-click a game and add it to a collection. A static collection is a folder you fill by hand; a dynamic collection auto-fills from store tags and filters (for example, “RPGs I played in the last three months”), so it maintains itself as your library grows. Steam also has Shelves for the library home, a Hide This Game option that pulls a title out of view while keeping your license, and sort/filter controls for playtime, recently played, and “ready to play.”
• PlayStation — Hide and Gamelists. On PS5, open Game Library → Your Collection, press Options on a title, and choose Hide; the Filter and Sort menu has a Hidden Items toggle to bring them back. Gamelists let you group titles the way collections do on Steam.
• Xbox — Hide from list and Groups. From My games and apps, the menu on a title offers “Hide from list,” and Groups bundle games you want kept together.
• GOG Galaxy — tags. Right-click a game and assign tags (Playing, Unplayed, Played, and whatever else fits), then group the library by tag.
• Nintendo — minimal by design. The eShop library is essentially a redownload and purchase-history list. There is little manual organization to do, which is its own kind of argument for tracking Nintendo titles in a separate tool.

One honest caveat: these interfaces move. Menu labels and locations shift between client updates, so each platform’s own Support page is the authority for the current steps, and the capability — hide, group, tag — is the durable part.

Step 3 — A status system is the spine

Collections and tags are storage. A status system is what makes the backlog readable. The taxonomy that works everywhere has five buckets:

1. Playing — actively returning to it.
2. Backlog — owned or intended, not started.
3. Played — tried or finished casually, no completion goal attached.
4. Completed — main story, campaign, or whatever you define as done.
5. Abandoned — stopped, not planning to resume soon.

The fifth bucket is the one people skip, and it is the most useful. Dropped games do not belong in your active queue, but they also should not vanish — “Abandoned” keeps them visible so you can see the shape of what you walked away from, without them competing with games you might actually finish. Define “completed” your own way: credits for a story game, all main worlds for a platformer, full 100% only if that is your thing. The system is for your decisions, not someone else’s.

Inside a single storefront you can approximate this with tags. Across platforms, a tracker does it properly, because the status follows the game, not the launcher.

Step 4 — Use time estimates as a filter, not a verdict

HowLongToBeat is the standard lookup for “how long is this.” It is crowd-sourced: players who finished a game submit their time, sorted into Main Story, Main + Extras, Completionist, and All Styles. A few things to keep straight:

• Accuracy scales with submissions. A blockbuster with thousands of entries gives a tight, trustworthy range. An obscure title with a handful of submissions can swing hard on one outlier playthrough.
• It is a range, not a promise. Your pace, your difficulty, and your completionist streak all move the number. Roughly is enough — you are estimating weeks, not minutes.
• It breaks for live-service games. A season-based shooter or an always-online title has no coherent “completion” state, so any number attached to it should be read skeptically or ignored.

Think of it as a pre-play sizing tool: “is this a Tuesday-night game or a three-weekend commitment?” Use it to choose, then close the tab.

Step 5 — A maintenance routine, not a project

The trap is treating library cleanup as a Sunday-afternoon purge. It never happens, and when it does it is exhausting. A 20-minute quarterly pass beats a yearly marathon:

• Re-tag what drifted. Games you started and set down belong in Abandoned, not Backlog.
• Surface the neglected. Sort any storefront by last played or total playtime to see what you forgot you owned.
• Cap the inflow. The backlog grows because buying is instant and playing is slow. A simple rule — finish or consciously drop one before the next purchase — keeps the pile from re-inflating between cleanups.

The hide-don’t-delete rule is the quiet hero here. Hiding a game you will never play again clears the view and keeps your ownership intact; you are not throwing anything away, just stopping it from shouting for attention.

The short version

1. Consolidate into one view (a launcher or a tracker) before you sort anything.
2. Use the storefront tools you already have: collections, tags, hide, groups.
3. Run a five-bucket status system; keep an Abandoned bucket.
4. Size games with HowLongToBeat as a range, never a verdict.
5. Do 20 minutes a quarter, not a yearly purge.

A backlog you can see, sort, and trust stops being a source of guilt and becomes what it should have been all along: a menu you actually use.