Sunk Cost Fallacy

[u/calicoknux1]

Apologies if this is posted often.

My Steam account contains over 300 games. Thousands of dollars. And that’s not counting all the hardware, from controllers, to VR, monitors, and the PC itself.

There is so much I know I want to do in life, I know the amount of gaming I do is constantly holding me back. But the amount that I’ve spent monetarily, knowing I have this library of so many games and such capable hardware, makes leaving it feel so irrationally difficult.

If not advice, knowing somebody else has at least felt this way would be nice.

(to be clear, I will not be selling or giving away any accounts or hardware on this subreddit)

[u/bluewolf71]

This is what keeps people trapped in things they don’t want to be in. All the time.

Long term live service games exist because people think of their spending as investments. Sunk cost fallacy.

Look at what you have and ask what you want to do. Then think of the games as not a thing you bought but a price you’re paying to not do other things.

If you get hung up thinking you can’t throw the money you spent away, then shift your thinking around and realize the money was already thrown away the minute you bought all those games you don’t remember or never played or that aren’t giving you what you want.

Steam itself is built around the hook of keeping you there. The cheap games. The central hub. You can’t stop playing , you have so many choice and options. All of it designed to keep you playing and spending. That’s all they really want.

[u/LastRespond4884]

That's part of the hardships of leaving an online mmorpg game for example, thousands of hours, real money spent in game, and nothing is yours to take when you quit, that's why it's so hard to stop.

I think you have several choices, depending on how strong your will is. 1. sell hardware, sell software, feel less bad about the monatery loss. 2. keep all your stuff and just take a break, from gaming. Once you will be actively doing all that other stuff that you want, comeback and think about what to do with all that stuff, contrary to this thread's name, some people just find a way to play casually, and keep all their stuff and game a lot less than they would, likes once a month.

(Regarding your comment about not giving it away here i think that if you were that would be really evil. it's like you come to an AAA meeting and sell booze, like what the hell?)

[u/MHSinging]

I know how you feel man. Just know that this kind of reasoning also keeps people in abusive relationships or horrible jobs. Your mind can simulate the physical feeling of a loss, but not of a win which makes it harder to leave a situation that can occasionally give you a good feeling.

[u/Madtparty1]

Yeah, it is definitely a challenge in quitting. You can’t get back all the money you’ve already spent, but you can stop the future spending by quitting.

I can’t remember where I heard this analogy when I was quitting, but I found it really helpful. If you were on an expensive vacation and had a great time, but eventually it was time to go, you wouldn’t tell yourself that you couldn’t leave because you had already spent so much time or money. You’d simply say, “It was fun, I made some good memories, but it’s time to leave and move on to the next adventure.”

I wish you the best!

[u/Illustrious-Gap-719]

It's really not that much at all, even over just a few years. Threehundred games is only a couple thousand. It sounds like more than it is. Live ten more years and you'll have made so much more.

[u/EyeFit]

Yeah, I feel you. I have near endgame everything tech and to be honest it's all very unnecessary, hedonic treadmill being what it is and all.

It is what it is though. If you long for more, it's never too late to abandon things and start again. These desires and attachments only serve to placate us really in the end. There is great happiness and meaning found in letting it all go. Getting there however can be difficult.

[u/TemperatureProud3388]

I also have an expensive pc, all of the peripherals like screen, mouse, keyboard and counter strike skins from my little two and a half year stint back into gaming. The cost has run up to around 14000$, if I sold the skins maybe I'd be able to retrieve around 5000$ of that money on a good day. It's for sure a lot, I've also stopped spending now and I'm back to just saving my money. I dont know how to rationalize it, of course it's sort of stupid to spent that much money on just fun. But at the end of the day for me it's not that much about the money, it's more about the time you've spent and skills you've built that makes it harder to quit. The money is around 500$ a month if you add it up over 2 years which is a lot, but really a lot of peoples hobbies has costs like this eventually. Like I've started windsurfing this year and I've already booked a windsurfing trip to Sardinia next year for around 2k$, or if I wanted to go for a month to Patagonia and walk in the mountains it'd be 10.000$ easily.

So I'm gradually quitting completely so I've put up my skins for sale on a website, so that they're not a part of what is pulling me back. I don't know if you can do a similar thing. I will also consider putting up my PC for sale and my gaming monitor. I've also thought about just selling my gaming monitor and buying a 35" 60hz monitor that you can pretty much only work on. Just finding practical solutions to our as much distance between you and the habit you want to get rid of. 

[u/KPaxley92x]

just think about the amount of money you would save. that would turn anyone off from gaming especially now

[u/max_but_lowercase]

Totally felt this way before, the money is already gone so do not let it steal your future time too

[u/XanderStopp]

Sell it man. Take the money and the skills you’ve learned and invest it into your new life.

[u/Basic_Requirement593]

yeah I know what you mean. but just look at it as a time that you used your money to play a hobby you enjoyed at the time and it is no longer serving you. no need to keep thinking about the money lost but what you are going to gain from not playing video games anymore.

[u/Throwadickmyway]

My advice would be to not worry about this at all, because deep down you probably know this is true: even if you deleted all that shit and threw away all that money, you'd start repurchasing your library anyway if you couldn't successfully find fulfillment in the other areas of your life.

I've been through this. I didn't have that many games, but I've easily gotten rid of thousands of dollars worth of gaming equipment. I deleted my steam account 3 or 4 times. I literally broke keyboards, cut the cords on computer mice. I smashed a 2000 dollar gaming laptop onto the floor and hammered it into pieces out of desperation and anger at having wasted so much of my life; I fucking bought another one a few months later.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is bullshit, because there's no amount of money you won't waste as long as you have it. The real solution is to just fix your fucking life and find other interesting things to do.

All that said, I'm not necessarily advocating against deleting the library. In fact I think each failed attempt at cutting myself off got me closer and closer to the state I'm in now, a couple years off gaming with no strong urge to go back, because every time I did go back, it didn't make me happy; I knew that from experience.

But perhaps more realistically, you could find a way to cut yourself off from your library without actually deleting it. For instance get rid of your controllers. If you're into online shooters, get a cheap bluetooth mouse that would be hell to play them with. I went to the extreme of doing all my internet browsing on a shitty Chromebook that can't even play Morrowind without technical know-how I don't have and don't feel like acquiring. Get more creative about ways to limit your access to games, because deleting your account very well may not work anyway.

[u/faabiopontes2]

You are spent the money, there's no coming back from that.

But you can still not spend your time in it.

Since you not considering selling or giving it away, I suggest you ask Steam to delete it.

I already did it with a account I had.

[u/mj_bones]

Perhaps reframe it by thinking of all the value you’ve got from your outlay. For example, think about how much a cinema or sports ticket costs, and that’s only for two/three hours. Your cost per hour of gaming will be much lower, so you’ve got great value out of it on a time-cost basis, even if you’ve spent more than most. Hopefully that helps loosen your current way of thinking,

Another idea is to box up all your gear and take 30 mins or so and be grateful to it for all the enjoyment it’s given you, all the fun things you’ve done in games. I.e. thanks for all the memories, but I’ve got to move on. It sounds a bit wacky but we humans appreciate the importance of rituals, and it also puts a positive spin on what you’re doing.

[u/Aeu_James]

In where, i live Steam and gaming is the cheapest hobby you will ever spend