I'm doing my part (unfortunately)

It shows the amount of faith people have in the platform. You're spending money on something that requires steam to continue to exist (as well as your user account), or else the purchase was wasted.
I wouldn't advance-buy a game I wasn't sure I'd play soon on a Google or Microsoft platform. I'd lose the ability to play the take within a year!
Oh, and also I guess it speaks to the quality of the discounts available on steam.

...yet.
It's my retirement plan. Buy the games now when they're on sale with the intention that one day, perhaps when I retire at 80, I'll have a plethora of time on my hands to finally play all the games in my backlog except I'm certain that I'll be so senile by then that I'll probably end up playing the same one over and over for what seems like the very first time each time I fire it up.

I can proudly say that every game I have on Steam or any other platform that has 0 play time, is a game I obtained for free.

Spent 4 hours in RDR2. Realized I hate westerns. It seemed like an ok game though

This completely ignores people that pirated games and then bought them once life let them contribute to the authors/devs they liked.
- I'd think these people probably make up a single number digit of the amount of games bought and never played.
  It would be interesting to have a breakdown of which games werr bought and never played. How many of them were gifts ? What's the share by rating ? Even better : When were the copies the most bought but never played ? This could bring up some interesting partterns.
  
  Which ones were ever present in humble bundles or other key bundles, what is the age of the purchase vs the age of the game, etc. I agree, a deeper understanding of the data would be great.

Probably 3/4 of my steam library are games that remain unplayed, and that I purchased with no intention to ever play.
...but that $5 was WELL worth the one game in the bundle that I actually cared about.
- Sometimes the bundle is even less expensive than just getting the one game, specially if you already own part of the bundle

And that's okay. It's also not a "pile of shame". If you're in the mood to play something and then aren't, that's fine. Games are supposed to be fun. Don't treat it as an obligation. Not every fucking choice in your life needs to be financially efficient.

Bought two tonight and haven't even plugged in the Steam Deck to get enough charge to download them, much less play them.
(Complete TellTale Walking Dead for $5? Damn right I'll remember that...)

I really only buy video games from indie devs.
If I never play a game by an indie dev that I bought, oh noooo what a catastrophe I gave an indie artist money without confirming they deserved it!
This meme should only make you feel slimey if you are dropping lots of money on AAA games where the artists who made the game don't get even remotely a fair share of profits.
Otherwise, giving independent artists to make more art benefits everyone even if you don't "use" / "need" the art.

And yet they'll grip that game right out of your library whenever they want to. The world that people complain about is the world they go wrong with. Once the fuckery started, that's when I stopped giving these companies money. I haven't bought a video game for probably decades.

Sometimes during a sale, I'll ask myself: if I never get around to playing this 4.99 Indy game, will I still be glad to have given the dev some money to have made such a game? The answer is often yes.

Made a steam family with my friends so atleast someone can enjoy my library
- I've got a Steam family going with my siblings and it makes me feel significantly better about my backlog, because even if I don't get to it there's probably something for everyone in the mix somewhere. Plus every now and again it's nice to break out a random indy game that nobody's played and just collectively suck together.

Humble bundle made me do it!
Most of my unplayed games have at least funded wikipedia or some charity.

I bought rdr2 and had trouble with the constant horse riding so I put a pin in it until later... Much later

Hopefully I'll get to those games after finishing these games and before I get new games.
- But new game comes out Friday and looks a lot more fun then those games and is launching with a Day 1 sale

That's nothing, I have like 100 games on the Epic Store and only played like a dozen. Haven't paid for any of them, though.

That's how Gaben manages to own a yacht collection while most of us can barely afford both housing and food!
- You can probably afford the "Yacht Simulator VR" though

unpopular(?) opinion: RDR2 is a boring graphic novel deceptively advertised as an open world FPS. The pacing is slow, the gunplay is garbage, and the core 'gameplay' loop is just a chain of unskippable CGI. I bought it based on the reviews, played for about an hour while experiencing an increasing sensation of buyers remorse. Never again. It's the last game I bought without pirating it first to see if its any good.
- If you play on PC you can mitigate a lot of the slow/survival aspects with mods
- I quite like it. Once you get used to the timings of actions you can be quite fast and fluid in combat and it's good enough to carry the game by itself, much better gunplay than gta. And the story is not the worst, though it is a slog occasionaly. Graphics do a lot of heavy lifting

Spending real life money on a game you don't actually own that you will never play is fucking genius ngl
Edit: then proceeding to make a habit out of it and developing some sort of e-hoarding disorder

I started to only buy games that run natively on my Mac. This has helped on cutting down this number a lot.

Why the fuck did I buy PUBG and Rainbow 6.
Cuz my friends played it? And I guess I assumed I would like them. But I never really bothered actually playing them. What a waste.