Comment by lupusreal

When I was a kid, this pattern of over-purchasing video games was very rare. When you had to go to the store and buy a game, it was very uncommon for people to buy a ton of games and then never get around to playing most of them. Even when the stores had discount bins, people would usually buy just a handful at a time and then play them until boredom (or frustration) before going back to the store. The one exception I can think of is when buying those CDs that came packed with dozens of old games from years ago, e.g. shovelware, when you hardly even knew what you were getting when you got the CD.

Also today, with gaming consoles, Nintendo's platforms, and similar, I don't think the pattern of buying lots of games and then never playing most of them happens very often.

What I'm saying is this pattern has something to do with the way Steam is structured, it's not an intrinsic property of game consumers which occurs with any kind of games store.