There is a specific kind of quiet that follows a library import. You connect Steam, then PlayStation Network, then Xbox, and a few seconds later a number appears that you were not quite ready for. Four hundred games. Six hundred. Whatever it is, it is more than you remembered owning, and a good share of them are titles you have no memory of buying. The first feeling is delight. The second, usually within about a minute, is closer to vertigo.
That vertigo is worth sitting with, because it points at something real. A list of everything you own is not the same as a record of what you have played. The import gives you the first. The second is the part that takes a little work, and the work is far more pleasant than it sounds.
The import is a starting point, not a finish line
It is tempting to treat the import as the whole job. The games are in, the number is impressive, and you could close the app feeling vaguely organized. But a raw import is only an inventory, and an inventory answers exactly one question: what do I have access to. It cannot tell you what you finished, what you loved, what you quietly gave up on, or what you have been meaning to start since 2021.
Perthro pulls your library from Steam, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live, and where a platform allows it, it carries your achievements and trophies across too. That part is automatic and genuinely useful on its own. But the half hour after the import is where a flat list of games turns into something closer to a journal, and it rewards a little unhurried attention rather than being skipped.
You do not have to do all of it in one sitting. A library is not a deadline. But the first few decisions are worth making while the import is still fresh in your mind, because that is when you actually remember the games.
Sort by honesty, not by guilt
The first pass is just status. In Perthro, every game you own is one of four things:
- Playing is what you have on the go right now. Be strict here. If you have not touched it in two months, it is not playing.
- Played is anything you have meaningfully experienced, whether you rolled credits or simply got what you came for and moved on.
- Plan to play is the honest backlog: things you genuinely intend to start.
- Shelved is for the games you have set down, with no guilt attached.
The honest version of this pass is the only one that helps you later. The temptation is to mark everything ambitious as "plan to play" because it feels better than admitting you are probably never going to reinstall that ninety-hour strategy game. Resist it. A shelved game is not a confession of failure. It is just a game you are not playing, and saying so plainly keeps the rest of your library readable. Shelving is also reversible. Five years from now you might be exactly the right person for that strategy game, and it will be waiting, clearly labelled, instead of buried in a backlog you stopped trusting.
Be careful with "plan to play"
If one status quietly sabotages everyone, it is this one. "Plan to play" is where optimism goes to pile up. Left unchecked, it becomes a second inventory, just as long and just as undifferentiated as the import you started with.
The fix is to treat the backlog as a short, ordered thing rather than a long, flat one. Perthro lets you reorder your backlog and wishlist by hand and gives you a "next up" view, and that view only works if you are willing to put four or five games at the top and mean it. The rest can sit below. They are not gone; they are just not next. There is a real difference between a list of games you might play someday and a list of games you have decided to play soon, and a backlog is only useful when it knows which one it is.
It also helps to keep the wishlist and the backlog separate in your head. The wishlist is desire: things you do not own yet. The backlog is responsibility: things you already own and have not yet played. Blending them is how you end up buying a new game during a sale while two hundred unplayed ones look on. Keeping them apart is a small, quiet act of financial self-defense.
Lists are where a library becomes yours
Statuses are the skeleton. Custom lists are the personality.
A status can only tell you the state of a game. A list can tell you a story about it, and this is the part of the import cleanup that stops feeling like admin and starts feeling like the reason you wanted a journal in the first place. Make a list of the games that defined a particular year for you. Make one for the comfort games you reinstall every winter. Make one for short games you can finish in a weekend, so that the next time you have only a weekend you are not scrolling for forty minutes. Make a deeply specific one: roguelikes you actually finished, games you played entirely on a handheld, sequels you liked more than the original.
Lists are also how a library stops being a private spreadsheet. In Perthro you can share a list, and a well-made list is one of the friendliest things you can hand another player. "Here are six games to play if you liked that one" is worth more than any storefront recommendation, because it comes from someone whose taste you actually know.
Rate the back catalogue, but lightly
The last pass is rating, and this is the one to take least seriously. You can give any game a score out of five stars and write a review of any length, and the back catalogue is a good place to practice doing that without pressure.
You do not need a paragraph. A rating and a single honest sentence about why is a complete entry, and it is far better than a blank. "Four stars, the ending stayed with me for a week" is a real diary note. You will be grateful for it later in a way you cannot quite predict now. The goal of rating your old games is not to build a ranked leaderboard of your own life. It is to leave yourself small, true markers, so that future-you can look back and remember not just that a game existed but how it felt to play it. Perthro pulls its game data from IGDB, so the cover art and details are already in place; all you are adding is the part only you know.
Work backward from the games you remember most strongly, and stop when it stops being fun. An incomplete set of honest ratings beats a complete set of dutiful ones.
Before the summer rush
There is a practical reason to do this now rather than later. The quiet stretch of mid-May is about to end. Forza Horizon 6 arrives on May 19, Summer Game Fest and Steam Next Fest both land in June, and the back half of the year tends to bury everyone in new things to want.
A library you have sorted, even loosely, handles that flood gracefully. A library you have not is simply going to get a few hundred more entries dropped on top of an already unreadable pile. Twenty or thirty minutes of honest triage now is the difference between walking into the summer with a journal you trust and walking in with an inventory you have already learned to ignore.
So connect your accounts, let the import run, and then give it a little of your attention. Sort by what is true, keep the backlog short, build a list or two that sounds like you, and leave a few honest sentences for the games that mattered. The number at the top will still be large. But it will mean something now, and that is the whole point of keeping a journal instead of a list.