Monthly Update #6: Halfway Already?

June 2025

Another month has come and gone already. And we’re halfway through 2025 already! Where is the time going? I’ve got a mix of June, Q2, and YTD stats in this one so buckle up!

Game Acquisitions

Interesting mix of acquisitions this month, from old delisted PC games to Steam family purchases to Humble Choice and everything in-between. I got all of these for next to nothing too. I’m convinced gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies you can get into. The amount of time I can get out of these versus how much I spent on them is just insane.

# of Games: 38

Total Money Spent: $4.23

Price/Game: $0.11

Game Recaps

Only played Tales of Phantasia this month so only one playlist to link to. The last of these videos from June will be going up through July 4^th as I’m finally almost caught up from my Game Pass binge back in May. No solo gaming this month but that’s OK, everything is better with friends! In the game this month, among other things, we made pacts with the Four Great Spirits and their leader, met the racist elves, and witnessed the beginning of a great war whose conclusion is no longer set in stone due to altering past events. Exciting stuff! 

TV/Movie Recaps

Here is everything I watched last month:

·       Star Wars: Andor Season 2 Episodes 11-12 (complete)

·       My Little Pony: Make Your Mark Season 2 Episodes 5-7 (still watching, show ended)

·       The Last of Us Season 2 Episodes 1-7 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Family Guy Season 23 Episode 15 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 Episodes 1-9 (all caught up, show ongoing)

·       Tales from the Loop Season 1 Episodes 1-5 (still watching, show ended)

·       Mickey 17

·       The Boondock Saints

·       11:14

·       Ghost in the Shell

This was a solid month for TV shows. Of course, it helps that I’m a big fan of Star Wars, Marvel, The Last of Us, and sci-fi in general. I’d say the movies were a slight step down in quality from the TV shows but still enjoyable nonetheless. As much as I enjoyed season 2 of The Last of Us and am enjoying Tales from the Loop, I think I have to give my favorite to Daredevil this month. Like I mentioned in my weekly post a couple days ago, it really feels like a seamless continuation of the Netflix show. I can’t wait to see how it develops in season 2.

YTD Stats

I can’t believe we’re halfway through the year already. But that means more fun stats! At first I was just going to include quarter 2 but decided seeing year-to-date would be more interesting. Once again, since I wanted the weeks to run Sunday-Saturday, the weekly graphs will encompass 12/29/24-6/28/25.

Q2

YTD

  

  

Starting with the Q2 pie chart, I see that Tales of Phantasia makes up the biggest slice by far. This isn’t to surprising to me because I haven’t been doing a lot of single-player gaming lately. If it weren’t for my two-week Game Pass trial, it would’ve been the only thing on there. That means like 60% of my total gaming time for the quarter took place over two weeks! I really need to finish up this Playnite and emulation setup business and get back to gaming on a more regular basis. Expanding out to the whole year, Tales of Phantasia is still really big but doesn’t even come close to Final Profit. I spent A TON of time on that game, and loved it a lot. Definitely my favorite game of the year so far. Torment: Tides of Numenera, my “current” single-player game that I haven’t touched since March, still manages to hold third longest playthrough of the year. I really need to get back to that.

Moving on to the hours played graphs, I see June is my lightest month to date which is not surprising. Besides some Tales of Phantasia co-op, I didn’t get around to playing anything else. You can once again see the huge playtime bump Game Pass gave me in May which helped rocket it up to my busiest month so far. Now if only I could get back to something like February on a regular basis. You can see that same bump in the line chart too. Those really were my busiest weeks of the year by far. All the 0 hour weeks don’t feel great though.

Last but not least, my money spent to games acquired graphs. How much have I set myself back so far? Surprisingly, not that much at all. Halfway through the year and I’ve spent $114.28 on games so far. If I was buying full priced titles, this would be less than two AAA games purchased. Thanks to a combination of a ton of free games and indie bundles, I was able to get 301 games for this much. That’s a crazy amount of games, probably too much if I’m being honest. My backlog will never go down. There’s a slight correlation between how much I spend and how many games I get but it’s not that strong. You can see in week 10 that I spent very little money but got a ton of games (thanks to an itch.io charity bundle) and conversely in week 20 I spent a decent chunk of money and didn’t get as many games for it (thanks to a couple mid-tier Fanatical bundles). Very interesting! At least I think so.

Conclusion/Upcoming

Woo, that was a lot of stats. So many stats! Am I the only person who enjoys this stuff? Probably. Anyway, I don’t want to dive too deep into the emulation stuff here since I put that in the weekly posts. Just know that it’s been going slow and steady. July will hopefully see the end of all the research of games I want to play. After that, I’ll work on acquiring them and setting up all the emulators in Playnite to make sure they work. It’s sad to say that there’s once again a good chance I don’t get any solo gaming in again this month which is a shame. Maybe in August I’ll finally have everything set up? We’ll see. Expect more Tales of Phantasia though! I’ll also be dedicating almost all my watch time to Ghost in the Shell. Between the various films and anime series’, it will take more than the month to get through. Just need to finish up a couple shows first. Thanks for reading GCTuba’s stats corner 🤪 Catch you all next time!

Backlog total: 3,304 (+37)