Curating down is so hard. The fear of regret is real. I always like taking things and putting them in a box. Anything still in that box a few months or a year later is fair game.
I’ve been in the process of curating my digital collection, which admittedly is more forgiving since you can always add games you’ve had removed back to your Steam account through the same process. Having a smaller, more focused collection of games gives me peace of mind and helps focus my play. One strategy I have found very effective is the idea that if something isn’t a HELL YES, it’s a no. Applying this, I realized most of my “hell yes” games are action RPGs and survival horror games. I primarily enjoy reflexive action game-play and melancholic atmosphere. This in turn has helped me check myself when sales pop up by asking if I will truly enjoy the games in my cart or if I’m just jumping on a hype train. If a game doesn’t match my taste profile, I sit with it longer before deciding whether to pull the trigger or remove it from my cart/wish-list.
I’m too terrified to remove games from my Steam account BUT I always keep my list filtered to currently-installed games, so I’m not looking at my whole library at once, at least ^^
I’ve been in the process of downsizing my collection. Since having our son around 18 months ago I realized a lot of my games I bought for collection purposes. Games I will get round to, games that were cheap and then I realized, if I didn’t have time for these games then when will I have time to play them as a father. So the past few months I’ve been going through and grabbing a hand full at a time and deciding what games truly mean something to me, what games do I actually intend to play and not what somebody else told me was good. I’m not moving consoles on as I think they are the expensive part of the hobby but since I started doing this I feel much better now with less of a burden of a backlog to get through.