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2024 Goals in Review

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Aywren

The last day of the year is here, and it’s time to look back at the goals I made at the first of this year and see how I’ve done. While some of these goals were gaming oriented, this year, I also made some non-gaming goals I wanted to tackle.

Let’s get an overview, shall we?

Play Games I Own

Every year, the gaming backlog gets larger, no matter how I try. Playing games I already own, rather than buying new games, is always a goal for me. Looks like I started out the year with my Steam games at 67.1% played.

While I did purchase some new games this year, I tried to keep it to a minimum. How is my backlog looking at the end of 2024?

I’m now at 70.1% of the Steam game backlog played! Seeing that – as I said – I’ve picked up new games this year, this means that I’ve played more games than I bought.

I’m quite happy with where I ended this year. However, I do hope to get back to around 75% played in 2025 – I almost reached that back in 2023 before I got sidetracked by the massive JingleJam bundle at the end of last year.

Only Buy Games I Want to Play Right Away

I mostly stayed away from bundles this year – aside from some well-priced DLC bundles. For the most part, I did achieve this goal, asking myself if I’d actually play a game right away before I bought it.

There are a few exceptions, and a few that were free games I added to my library that I didn’t play instantly. I did keep a list of those games, though, and they’re at the top of my to-play list for 2025.

Overall, I wasn’t perfect on this goal, but I did quite well.

Blog About Backlog Discoveries

I did this a little bit, but not as much as I’d have liked. This is a goal for next year, too, where I want to start up my Backlog Bloggery posts. I hope that turning my backlog playing into content will help incentivize myself to try out more games in 2025… while bringing me back to a blogging habit.

Verdict? I did a mildly fair job of this, though I could have done better.

Walk with my Pikmin

I’d been using Pikmin Bloom as a way to encourage more consistent walking and exercise. However, I didn’t stick to it as much as I would have liked.

I still use the app and update it every day. The problem I have is that I’m hitting the max number of Pikmin I can own without paying money to increase this. It’s a pain to have to cull my Pikmin just so I can hatch more of them, and it’s sad to just release a Pikmin as soon as they level up because you realize it’s a duplicate. I just don’t have room for duplicates anymore.

I still interact with it and want to enjoy it, but I know I haven’t done as much with it as I hoped I would in 2024. I wonder if it’s time to look into another walking app – any suggestions?

Cut Back on Unnecessary Things

I did this at the beginning of the year. I canceled all my video and music streaming services. Some of these have stuck – I did not resub to Game Pass, for example. But others didn’t stick so well.

While I wanted to rely on Amazon Prime for my music and my video streaming, the truth is, Prime Music and Prime Video are both sub-par for the way I use such services. Prime Music just doesn’t work well for large playlists, which is what I tend to build - it seems to just play the same few songs of a large playlist over and over again, which gets annoying.

Prime Video added ads this year, along with being very unreliable about how long shows and movies even stay on the service. I tend to add shows to my watchlist that I want to come back to when I have time to watch something. By the time I do come back to watch something, often many of the shows I added to my watchlist were no longer available for free on Prime anymore, which was just frustrating.

So, I’ve gone back to Spotify and the ad-supported version of Netflix (because I choke on paying $16+ for a video streaming service). I hate paying for something with ads in it, though. The truth is, I just don’t watch the service enough to warrant more than $6 a month… so I’ll deal with the ads.

I just felt like every time I wanted to watch something, it was on a service I didn’t have, because Prime didn’t include it. So, I broke down and got Netflix again.

However, these are the only two streaming services I use, aside from Amazon Prime (which I use for shipping all the time). So, while I’m spending more than I want on services, it’s still not terrible in the long run.

Read More Books

I wanted to read more books this year. I set a goal to read 8 books, which I know to avid readers, is a very low number. But for me, with all my projects and games, I’m lucky to read at all.

Now, some of the books I finished this year were audiobooks. I don’t know where readers stand on whether an audiobook counts as a “read” – but for me, I’m counting it. Based on my Bookwyrm 2024 in review, I read 10 books this year, which is above my hoped-for goal!

That means that next year, I’m going to set 10 as my new goal. I already have a list of books on my mind to read.

Overall? Not a bad year for goals.

I could have done better, but I also could have done worse. Some of these goals will certainly hold over into next year, too. It’s nice to get a baseline – such as with number of books read – that I can shoot for next year. Raising the expectations a little each year is a way to build on what’s come before and get better over time.

Do you have any goals you set for 2024? How did that work out for you?

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