As many others here, I have accumulated a bit of a "backlog" over the years, consisting of games that were cheap to pick up on sale, games that I have/had general interest in, or new game releases. Whenever a new game came out, I felt kind of urged to play the new game, drop everything else, and quite often end up not picking up the "abandoned" games again.
Sometime last year, when money was a bit tight, I just started playing games I already had instead of worrying about keeping up with new game releases, and it's been really liberating. I finished Mass Effect 1-3 over a combined ~100h, I platinumed Sekiro, Bloodborne, and started Dark Souls and Elden Ring, I found my love for Frostpunk and have been blasting that for the past months. I'm just having a great time overall.
I think a good help in that regard was a comment I read on the rexxit equivalent of this community where they proposed to see games as countries and giving them a shot is like coming there to visit: visiting a country is cool, but you don't have stay there indefinitely to have a good time; it's always fine to leave the country and go visit another, and not seeing everything the country has to offer does not worsen your experience there.
I don't stress about picking something back up again after having a good time with it and looking for something else to play. I don't stress about new releases (too much - Diablo 4 is currently pretty difficult to stay away from for me lol) because the game won't vanish magically if I check it out a week later, several months later, a year later. I just play whatever I feel like playing and whenever I feel like playing it. If I end up deleting something off the console - that's fine. There's always something else to play.
Not really sure what my point is, really, but felt inclined to get the ball rolling in this community. I like the idea of being a patient gamer a lot, and it's helped me enjoy games a lot more than I used to, so I wanted to contribute too and be a more active part of the "movement".
Thanks to everyone who's part of the community and who's been promoting good vibes!
I can definitely relate when it comes to Nintendo games. I bought ToTK on day one, and I still haven't finished it. I'm trying to pace myself and make it last as long as possible. Once I'm done with it, I'm not sure which game to play next on my PC.
Replaying old games and discovering older "new" ones, at least to me, has been the norm for me for a few years now. I told myself I would buy Cyberpunk 2077 on day one, but I'm still waiting for it to be considered "done" and released as Game of the Year edition.
It's going to be really hard for me to be a "Patient Gamer" with Starfield later this year. I've been a fan of Bethesda RPGs since the days of Morrowind.
Tears of the Kingdom has also been an exception to me, I've been playing it since day one. It's a great game, I'm just about 100 hours in, and I'd say BotW was better as an overall package. Less handholding, and less generic content in general (BotW had Koroks, TotK also has bubbul gems, a billion points in the depths where most of it is just lightroots, monster camps with zonaite, and building stations with same part layouts; Hudson singposts, way too many armor sets that are too tedious to switch on the fly all the time, chests with maps, chests with sages' wills, a billion caves, armor upgrades to do, stable photos to take... it's a bit too much for one game).
I absolutely love the system of building whatever impractical crap I come up with, and there have been improvements all over the board, I'm just a little disappointed it feels much more like the hated Ubisoft open world formula. Also I feel the shrines have been more interesting in BotW, maybe that's related to the more limited rune/ability set.
I think the beauty of these two modern Zelda games, at least to me, is that BotW and TotK are similar yet totally different. Both offer distinct approaches to the core gameplay, and if you don't enjoy one, you can play the other and have a similar yet different experience, at least in my opinion. Surprisingly, I prefer TotK over BotW as it capitalizes on the mistakes of BotW and brings new elements to the table.
Overall, both games are amazing in my opinion, each with their place, flaws and all.