- Primary Subject: Gaming
- Key Update: It's acceptable to stop playing games you don't enjoy.
- Status: Live
- Last Verified: 2026-09-18
- Quick Answer: This article explains why gamers should not feel obligated to finish every game they start and how doing so can enhance their enjoyment.
Gaming can be an expensive hobby. Often, we try to power through a subpar experience—or one that simply isn’t connecting with us—just to justify our purchase. I’m here to tell you something many enthusiasts won't: it’s okay to drop games without ever finishing them.
Listen, I get it. Sometimes that shiny new $70 AAA game everyone’s talking about is too tempting to resist. Even if you suspect you won't enjoy it, you try to force yourself to like it because, let’s face it, coming to terms with having potentially wasted money hurts too much. FOMO (fear of missing out) also plays a massive role. This September is stacked with releases: Marvel’s Wolverine, Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Orbitals, Silent Hill: Townfall. There’s too much happening, and feeling left out kind of stings.
That psychological need to belong to the conversation can ruin the experience, too. Instead of stopping to smell the roses, you treat a game like content that must be binged without genuinely engaging with it on a nuanced level. We take a bite of one title, then rush to the next without properly digesting what came before.
I’m saying this because I used to make those exact mistakes. Eventually, I realized that dropping games was the healthiest thing I could do. It’s not just about walking away from a title you aren't enjoying in the moment; by sparing yourself a miserable slog, you create a better opportunity to give that game a second chance down the road when your mindset is right.
One of my biggest regrets is getting sucked into the Fallout 4 hype train in 2015. I bought it alongside Shadow of Mordor as it was a game I missed out on a year prior. I figured, two bangers at a discounted price, such a smart monetary decision! It was only after I spent a solid 10 hours wrestling with Bethesda’s archaic design choices that I came to terms with the fact that I had wasted what I thought was an excellent discount.
Even after uninstalling and enjoying myself cutting through hordes of orcs in Shadow of Mordor, coming back to the wasteland in Fallout just reminded me that those types of games weren’t for me. And off it went, back into its case, never to be played again.
Context and timing matter a lot. If you’re jumping into an ordinary action game right after finishing a personal GOTY contender in the same genre, it’s natural to experience a sense of mundanity and write the title off as mediocre. True as that may be in the moment, putting it down, letting it collect dust in your backlog, and picking it up later during a dry spell might lead you to realize you simply weren't appreciative at the time—because comparison truly is the thief of joy.
Of course, there will be times when—even after letting a game marinate, washed away alongside dozens of other impulse buys from a Steam sale—it still won’t connect with you. At that point, that nagging feeling of regret needs to leave. It’s not you, it’s the game. You tried; you gave it a fair shot not once, but twice, and sometimes even more than that.
Learning to let go without forcing yourself to cross a finish line can work wonders for your relationship with gaming. You’ve already spent the money; even with the looming paranoia surrounding digital licenses, there’s no point in treating leisure time like an unpaid second job just to clear a backlog. Gaming is meant to be enjoyed, not consumed like a checklist of chores.
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