Gaming

I don't consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.

My value for gaming is less of a simple equation, but my examples of games that are "undoubtedly worth the price" are going to consist a lot more of shorter games that are absolutely spectacular for their shorter playtime with a £30ish price tag.

Think:

• Outer Wilds
• Tunic
• Hollow Knight
• Journey
• The Witness
• Portal (1&2)
• Celeste
• Undertale
• To The Moon
• Ori and the Blind Forest/Will o the Wisps
• The Witcher 3

I have no strict criteria for this, but I can say I've had far, far more than my money's worth from those games in terms of the value they brought to my life.

If you do want to look purely at the number of hours you'll get out of a game vs its price, look no further than Guild Wars 2. You can get all the content for under £100 I beoieve, and I've spent 6000+ wonderful hours playing it. It's not the same kind of enjoyment though.

I don’t think hours played/price is a good metric. Often games can be way more expensive that only last 10-20 hours yet give better gameplay and enjoyment.

Hours to complete is such an odd measure of value. I'd rather have a 10 hour experience I loved than a tedious 100 hour experience.

Factorio is probably one of the best deals I’ve gotten; I paid $30 and at this point I’ve played it for at least 200 hours because I find it such a fun game.

I pay $20 to watch a mediocre rehashed superhero movie for 2 hours. I can absolutely pay $60 or $70 for something that gives me 10 hours of entertainment. And most games I pickup give me way more than 10 hours. So I find gaming to be worth it pretty much all the time.

I suppose I'd prefer if short games weren't overly expensive, but I never liked the hours per dollar thing. I don't like replaying games. I'd rather buy six two-hour indie games for ten dollars each and have each one be at least somewhat unique and engaging, than spend 60 on a sprawling hundred hour AAA game filled mostly with repetition and busywork. Life's too short for that, you know?

Rimworld for sure. I paid full price for it on Ludeon's website and played it a lot. When it released on Steam I started playing it there and now it's my most played Steam game by far. Based on some quick and dirty math, it's cost me under $0.03 per hour of enjoyment.

Another big one is Against the Storm. I've only played a few hundred hours so far but that's been worth every penny I spent too. I bought it during the last Winter Sale on Steam and I've put in about 200 hours.

Some of my most favorite games were fairly short experiences.

In fact I value when a game doesn't waste my time and is 100% fun, great content without fillers and stuff to just give you FOMO that ends up being boring and underwhelming when you actually try to do it. Even worse when you can't tell what is and isn't the filler.

Like, I've bought Outer Wilds for maybe 20€ or so and it is probably my favorite game of all time. I wouldn't have bought it for 60€ (and it's especially a hard sell because you can't really entice anyone to play it without spoiling some part of the game to them which really sucks; like, I'd argue even the Steam description already spoils some of the magic). But it would be 100% worth it even if I 100% the game after maybe 10 hours (and there is no way to replay it, unfortunately).

Similarly, I've gotten A Short Hike for free with a Humble Bundle subscription (and not like free to own as part of the monthly bundle but just free in their "trove") and I also completely loved it - was maybe 5 hours.

Meanwhile I played, say, Cyberpunk 2077 for free, finished it, and I am still kinda disappointed? Like there was good stuff in the game but I'm really glad I didn't pay for it - it's enough that I paid by putting the time in it. It left me with a feeling of wasted potential and like "surely there has to be something more" and then I finished the game and there wasn't more. It's so hard to explain... Like yeah, I enjoyed many hours of it, I think. But in the end it doesn't feel good overall.

So yeah, these are the extremes, but I really don't think you can put value on a game like that. Games by their very nature vary a lot and length isn't (or shouldn't) really be the main criteria. And enjoyment varies a lot as well. It can be so good that a few hours of it is enough, and it can be so mild that it's not really worth playing. Oh and that also completely ignores the fact that some games are made to be played for hundreds of hours by design (Factorio, Rimworld), while purely story games can hardly be stretched for dozens of hours and still be fun/interesting. And games with balanced narrative and gameplay can reach a few dozen hours but even for the larger ones going 50-100 hours is usually a stretch.

Ditto on what others have said. Hours/price is a lousy metric because nowadays lots of games have some pretty toxic mechanics that incentivize sticking with a boring experience (New World, Assassin's Creed, etc.), inflating how much time you'd spend in a game that should be much shorter.

Games I've paid full price and I don't regret: Rimworld, Baldur's Gate III, Wasteland 2, Doom 2016, Celeste, Project Zomboid.

Well civ 6 was like $10 with all DLCs and I've played for over 500 hours. Hard to get a better ratio than that.

If I enjoy playing the game.

Price per unit time suggests that the only value of a game is in how much time it consumes.

The value calculus is going to be different for everyone but for me, I tend to look for:

• A game which is a game first and foremost rather than an entertainment experience. That is to say: something that demands decision making of me in which I can either increase or decrease the payoffs of those decisions. Games which focus heavily on cinematic scenes, heavy QTEs, or long dialogs disinterest me.

• I am often willing to take a punt on a game that tries to do something creative and interesting.

• I tend to not like games that demand a high degree of memorization and/or dexterity.

• Games which perform well. A recent example of a regretful purchase I made was with Shin Megami Tensei V. I adore the series but the framerate on the Switch really brought my experience down to a level where I just didn't want to play anymore.

The weights of these things will change from game to game and other elements may enter or exit the equation from time to time, of course.

Larger and/or gamey games 1€/h. Here I put games such as the Tomb Raiders, cRPGs etc.

Narrative experiences 5€/h. Stray Gods and other high quality intense experiences. Often short and with limited replayability. Like seeing a movie a second time.

I have a rule I refer to as the pint limit.

If you are in a pub and have one pint an hour, you would generally consider that to be a good use of time. This means one hour is worth approximately the cost of your usual pint at your local pub. For me this is about £3.50.

I then divide the price of the game by this number to get the number of hours the game has to provide to make it worth it. So for example Risk of Rain 2 cost me about £21 and I have played about 280 hours, meaning that I have exceeded my pint limit of about 6 hours by nearly 274 hours. Solidly worth it!

Occasionally a game will not reach its pint limit, but will be worth it nonetheless, e.g. The Return of the Obra Dinn, but generally I find the metric exceptionally accurate to my feeling of worth for a game.

The final advantage is that this scales with the cost of living (and usually thus wages) in your area.

I think about 10% of the games I bought since 2016 have not yet reached the pint limit, which is generally pretty good going.

Terraria. Hands down. No other game I've ever played has had the same sheer amount of value for $10 fucking dollars.

A honorable mention would be Stellaris and good ol' Skyrim. But their larger price tag definitely means that Terraria is greater value.

A certain number of hours reached is a fairly easy metric to use and it works great for a lot of games. But let me tell you about Senua's Sacrifice.. that game is short. It was only $20 or something and 8 hours to play through. But it made me ugly cry at the ending. It was so emotionally charged I just sobbed for the girl. That was definitely worth the price.

I only purchase full price games under one of 2 conditions. Either it's a series that I deeply love and know for certain will always put out quality games (Zelda, Mario, Monster Hunter) or it's a game that is extremely well reviewed and doesn't go on sale (factorio, other Nintendo games)

As for whether I believe a game I've purchased was worth it, I don't equate hours invested to price worthiness, but rather my overall enjoyment. I've put too many hours into games I regret ever buying (Ark) and played some games that were far too short but I would've paid double for (Outer Wilds). Rather, I believe it's how much the game affects you when you come out of it. Ark was a frustrating, grindy experience, but Outer Wilds literally changed who I am as a person. When I play something like Sonic Frontiers I come out in awe, and giddy with how much excitement that game gave me, but when I play something like Elder Scrolls Online, I don't dislike it but I don't feel anything special. Frontiers was absolutely a worthy purchase but ESO was not, because one really affected me and the other, even though I wouldn't call it a bad game, just didn't really do anything to me.

I can’t say I have any sort of standard way to gauge that. Once the money is spent, I don’t really think about it anymore and yeah that’s probably a result of my monetary privilege, but it’s my honest answer to your question. It’s almost impossible to determine about the monetary value of an experience of a piece of art.

Beat Saber. it was the Christmas time 2020, so during the pandemich, and I was living alone and had a lot of free time. Got myself a PSVR set. I maybe bough a game full price just once before. And Beat Saber cost me like 40 dollars. But it was so worth it. Played all of it, and even bought some DLC. An amazing game.

Valheim at msrp. So. Many. Hours. Such a fantastic game.

Vampire Survivor. So cheap but fun to jump in for a run or six.

Quite a few times.

BG3 already payed itself off in the first couple of weeks. Subnautica is another. And although I loathe to admit it, I do have about 2000 hours in Dead By Daylight.

Hell, I've bought and re-bought the original two Fallout games several times back in the 90's as I wore out the CD's over the years. And there plenty of games in between them and the newest that were absolutely worth it. Some aren't even playable anymore.

And since I got into the Indie scene the numbers went up.

So yeah, quite a few games all in all.

$70 for Zelda TOTK, $60 of Baldurs Gate 3, $20 for Factorio. All these games were 100% worth the money.

Many F2P games are worth their price of $0.

Warframe. Rocket League. TF2. Counter-Strike.

The games often become unworthy of the price the moment you spend anything on them tho.

I like sandbox games and I end up getting so much Value. For factorio I got it for $40 and so every 1000 hours I buy a copy and gift it to someone. Since they have no dlc or any other way to support. Also do the same with rimworld and age of empires 3 DE the main games I have lots of hours in. For league of legends I have 1000s of hours but I won't give them a fucken cent cause I hate the game.

Agree with others that length/price ratio doesn't really reflect how much I enjoy a game.

If I like it, I like it. The hours are irrelevant to me. I can get just as much enjoyment out of a six hour game with zero replayability as I can with a dozens-of-hours-long replayable RPG. It's the experience, not the time.

Also, with Game Pass and the fact that I buy everything on sale, there's no real good answer if I did approach it that way.

That said, the only two games I've bought at full price in the last decade or so were Breath of the Wild and Spider-Man PS4.

Massively fun and I didn't feel like I had wasted any money.

Red Alert & World of Warcraft.

I guess Diablo 2 but I didn't have the possibility to buy it back in the day. Buying games wasn't as straightforward as buying a CD of music where I lived.

The Orange Box.

Probably the last I paid MSRP.

What you're asking about here is value, which is a purely subjective thing.

Here's the thing: we all play games for our own reasons. Some play for an interesting story, some play for challenging mechanics, some play to be scared, some play just for something to pass the time. How much you enjoy a game will depend on how well it meets your goals and that's often hard to quantify.

If your sole purpose of playing is to pass the time, then sure $/hour is a great metric for how good a value it is.

And let's not forget that people all have different amounts of disposable income. For someone with a lot of money to spare, it takes a lot less to make $60 "worth it" than for someone without reliable income.

At the end of the day, everyone has their own idea of value and it will change over time.

I bought Kerbal Space Program 1 for $14 when it was in version 0.16 I think, before it was in early access on Steam. I've received all updates and DLC for free since then because I got in before a certain date, logged definitely thousands possibly near 10k hours in it, and it is by far the biggest bang for my buck I've ever gotten from a video game ever. Thank you HarvesteR and original dev team!

Hades is up there. So many runs, so much content, $25.

The absolute best value I ever got for a video game was for my old Atari 2600. I got a Solaris cartridge at a flea market for just a few bucks. It was cheap enough that I bought it despite never having heard of the game before.

The graphics capabilities of an Atari are laughable by today’s standards, but in terms of overall fun and hours played, nothing has ever beaten Solaris.

I think that most of the games that I've really enjoyed have been ones that tend towards the "full price" side money-wise, but which I have played for a long time, replayed a number of times, not just done a single pass. Gotten DLC on. Often modded.

Think:

• Fallout 4
• Oxygen Not Included
• Caves of Qud
• Civilization V
• Stellaris
• Noita
• Kenshi
• Nova Drift
• Kerbal Space Program
• Rimworld
• Mount & Blade: Warband

The amount I've paid per hour of play on those is tiny.

My real constraint is the amount of time I have. I mean, I haven't really been constrained by what it costs to play a game. I have a backlog of games that I'd be willing to play.

The waste, from a purely monetary standpoint, is overwhelmingly games that I buy and touch briefly, and don't find myself playing at all. Frostpunk sounded neat, because I like similar genres (city-building), but I completely disliked the actual game, for example. A few Paradox games (Stellaris) I've really gotten into, but a number I've also found completely-uninteresting (Europa Universalis, say). There are apparently a number of Europeans who are extremely into the idea of their historic people taking over Europe, for example, and Paradox specializes in simulating those scenarios. I just don't care about playing that out. Sudden Strike 4 -- I've really enjoyed some real time tactics WW2 games, like Close Combat, but couldn't stand the more arcade-oriented Sudden Strike 4.

If you could give me a Noita, but high resolution and with some neat new content and physics I'd happily pay $100.

I've played Nova Drift for about 180 hours. That game presently sells for $18. So I paid about ten cents an hour. The price of the game is a rounding error in terms of the entertainment I got from it. Paying ten times as much for a sequel or DLC comparable to the stuff in the original game would be fine as long as I were confident that I'd enjoy and play it as much as I did the original game.

Sudden Strike 4 is about $20. I played it, forcing myself back to it, made it to about an hour total. So I paid about $20 an hour, or about 200 times the rate for Nova Drift. And I didn't enjoy that hour much.

In general, my preferred model would be for publishers to keep putting out DLC on highly-replayable games as long as people are interested in buying it: when I find something that I know I like, I want to be able to get more of it. If the Caves of Qud guy would hire more people to produce more content and just sell it as DLC, I'd be happy with that.