Games Worth Deleting From Your Backlog
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
(2020)85WHY IT'S HERE
A genuinely good game buried inside a checklist so long that most players stop caring around hour thirty. Deleting it after the main story beats is not a failure, it is a mercy.
Cyberpunk 2077
(2020)75WHY IT'S HERE
If you started this on a base console at launch and stopped out of frustration, that old save is not worth resuming. The game changed so much that starting fresh on current-gen hardware beats continuing a broken run.
No Man's Sky
(2016)74WHY IT'S HERE
Early saves from before the major content updates carry none of the systems that made the game worth playing later. Deleting and restarting fresh gets you a completely different, much better game.
Watch Dogs: Legion
(2020)81WHY IT'S HERE
An ambitious "play as anyone" system that never found a character worth caring about. The novelty wears off long before the story does, and most players never see the ending.
Anthem
(2019)60WHY IT'S HERE
A live-service shooter that was effectively abandoned by its own studio within a year of release. There is no live content left to chase, so there is no reason to keep it installed.
Final Fantasy XV
(2016)81WHY IT'S HERE
A road trip that turns into a rushed, tonally confused final act once the open world ends. Most players who stall out do so right at that transition and never come back.
Days Gone
(2019)75WHY IT'S HERE
A solid but extremely long open-world game that repeats its core loop well past the point of novelty. If you are past hour fifteen and still not hooked, later hours will not change that.
Fallout 76
(2018)51WHY IT'S HERE
The version most people remember quitting no longer resembles the game as it exists today. If you are judging whether to keep it based on that first impression, delete the memory, not the current game.
Saints Row
(2022)61WHY IT'S HERE
A buggy launch and a flat open world made this an easy one to abandon early. Nothing in the back half of the game changes that first impression enough to justify pushing through.
Methodology & FAQ
Selected from titles that frequently appear in "did not finish" discussions, based on pacing issues, excessive padding, or a launch state the game never fully recovered from.
Q: Are you saying these are bad games?
No. Most of them are well made and several were genuinely acclaimed. The list is about whether finishing them is worth your remaining time, not about their quality.
Q: What if I already paid full price for one?
The money is gone either way, and forcing yourself through thirty more hours does not bring it back. Treat the purchase as a sunk cost and judge only whether the next session sounds appealing.
Q: How do I know when to drop a game for good?
The fifteen-hour check is a useful rule: if a game has not hooked you by then, its later hours are unlikely to change that. For shorter games the same test lands around the two-hour mark.
