Gamers worldwide have a running joke: They keep buying games despite having stacks of unplayed titles in their libraries.
Steam runs weekly sales and a few big sales featuring almost every publisher and game studio on the platform. In 2024 alone, 544.26m games have been sold (both on sale and at market price). Many of those titles sit in users’ libraries, never to be played.
The Steam Backlog Challenge was a streaming fundraising event benefiting No Kid Hungry. Participants compete–purely for fun–by playing games from their video game backlog (games bought and never played) from their library on Steam.
This case study covers the basics of the event, the production process, and how one might build upon a similar concept.
Background
According to PCGamesN, Steam users have spent over $19 billion on games they haven’t played. We saw an opportunity to appeal to that audience of gamers with dozens or hundreds of games. By focusing on never-played games in Steam libraries, we built an app for No Kid Hungry to track gamers’ unplayed titles to challenge them to play more instead of buying more.
No Kid Hungry was a longtime agency client who we produced more than a dozen fundraising events for. NKH is working to end childhood hunger by helping launch and improve programs that give all kids the healthy food they need to thrive. Through their STREAM initiative, we did gaming events featuring official support from Magic: The Gathering, Sea of Thieves, and Elder Scrolls Online (to name a few). Such fundraisers always featured support from content creators, game publishers, and developers to make the organization’s vision a reality.
We have always created events for audiences interested in different genres or “feels” in gaming. For this event, however, connecting to a broader public was vital: the entirety of the PC gaming community. The Steam Backlog Challenge wasn’t a celebration of a video game genre or an IP, but a way to entice people to play some of those games they bought on a Steam sale.
Production for the Steam Backlog Challenge
We built an app that reads a player’s game library and flags played and unplayed games. Every game was assigned a different set of points based on how long it had been sitting in their libraries gathering figurative dust.
The longer it had been sitting unplayed on their digital shelves, the more points players gain for playing. The leaderboard on https://www.summerbacklogbattle.com/ shows player names, scores, and their most recently played title. In doing this approach, we integrated directly with the Steam API, and we thought from a player’s perspective about potential concerns around privacy and security, baking that into the final product and how we presented it.
Our long-time developer partner, Echo Gate Tech, helped on that front by providing best practice expertise and production support. That meant we only pulled the bare minimum of information from users’ Steam Library to protect users, the client, and ourselves. Because we used the Steam log-in functionality, we never read, tracked, or stored anyone’s credentials. We used the Steam API to pull only the information we needed for the app and nothing extra.
On the User Experience front, we decided early on what variables impacted the leaderboard. We ran thought experiments and considered different types of players. Our initial concern was that people with the oldest libraries would have the most considerable advantages. But even people with 2-year-old libraries had an extensive enough library to join the event (thanks to the numerous sales with deep discounts Steam does weekly).
We installed a leaderboard on the event’s website so that anyone could see what other people were playing.
We partnered with game developers, and subreddits (such as r/GameDeals and r/Steam) to promote the event and to give away keys as donation incentives. Donors could give $10 for a random game or $25 for three random games.
Over 250 gamers joined the event. Participation varied, representing a larger cross-section of PC gamers than we anticipated. Some people played a lot of games. Some played only one game. But every participant was engaged in their own way, and they played from a big pool of games, with almost no repeats of game titles in the “Recently played” section of the leaderboard.
Looking ahead
Building upon the concept of the Backlog Challenge to feature more platforms, such as Playstation, Nintendo, and Xbox, would allow us to bring together more gamers.
We see potential partner opportunities for a new iteration of the event as well. Publishers and developers could have their games be worth more points through bounties to further drive interest in their titles and sponsorship dollars for the client. Retail sponsors could provide prizes for individual challenges or more points to place competitors higher on the leaderboard.
Furthermore, with content creators directly attached to the event, we could feature a board of bounties with curated lists of games to tackle, chosen by those notable personalities. By completing a list, players could earn more points. Curated content of this kind could also enhance players’ experiences by leading them to hidden gems.
This event shows that nonprofits can leverage huge platforms indirectly via their API and community tools, capitalizing on their audiences without needing direct support. We should note we did talk with Steam directly prior to this event to ensure we respected their ToS (Terms of Service) completely, confirming we had developed the concept in accordance with their public guidelines. This extra step was diligence for the client that confirmed our initial concept was well within the ToS.
Sure, official support from big names in the industry can usually provide a massive boost to any event, but there are always creative ways to utilize what’s available for public use to reach out to gamers in fun and innovative ways.