Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?
I feel like I’m on the upper end here. But to be fair I also tend to play things that has a lot of replayability. So I usually reach 100+ hours on my favorites eventually.
Eager to hear how others reason about it.
Edit: Added the enjoyed part. I agree with the comments that frustrating hours shouldn’t be included in the measure :)
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 consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.
So true and well said.
I love playing a 70 hour From Software game or a 50 hour JRPG as much as the next guy. But some of my favorite games of all time are old classics like Super Mario World or Zelda: OoT, which can probably be completed in a single session or two if you know what you’re doing. And there have been some truly great, but short, indie games over the years.
Then there are also sim games and arcade/fighting games that had great reliability and you can get many hours out of if you like them.
In the end, as long as the game is fun and satisfying, I don’t care how long it lasts.
I think people don’t often factor in that time in a game is just as much or more a cost than money is.
If I make it super nerdy, my equation for games would be more like fun / (money cost + time cost). But really I don’t actively quantify these things, I just have a sense of it.
The other thing id say is that games recently are being judged more on how they respect the players time. The max game money cost is locked in at $70, likely for a long time. So the thing being optimized right now is the fun/time part. Not respecting the players time is one of the worst crimes a game can commit in my opinion.
That’s what I’m hearing about games like Starfield and it’s always been a criticism for games like assassins creed. Like they’re fun games, but the time investment is far too large for what they offer.
The reason it doesn’t apply to sim games or city builders is because you are largely in control of how best your time is spent. That’s why open world games used to rule Steam for a long time and still somewhat do.
Anyways that’s my rant.
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.
Yup I think of some games as fidget spinners, they’re just zoneout games that fill time… then there are games with amazing stories, mechanics, characters, graphics etc that provide real, if shorter experiences.
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.
200 hours
Just a beginner, huh?
It’s true, you caught me
What are you doing here? It’s not growing now is it? You see, it has to grow! The factory MUST grow!
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.
I agree! It’s not easy to measure this and my equation of course falls a bit flat. But as a rule of thumb I think it’ll do. Albeit more so for the games I tend to play I guess.
My question stems from having seen people complain that pricy games were to short. I’m kind of thinking about it like a cinema visit you know? If you enjoyed the movie that was 2h and cost $10 (taken willy nilly from the air), how could you equate that to a game?
I think the metric works pretty well if you are willing to quit a game if it’s not interesting enough.
If it’s tedious, why would you keep playing? Just stop and move on to a different game. If you only play it for 15 hours before dropping it, then that becomes the figure for the $/t ratio.
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.
That’s pretty much my look on things as well! I’ve felt like the gaming community generally demands more out of a game than they’d a movie.
Completely agree. They demand more than most communities, while enjoying one of the few products that has dodged inflation in a huge way. I remember paying $60 for games in 2000. 20+ years later, and I’m supposed to be livid that most are still $60. The amount of whining is so crazy it’s embarrassing.
Welll…it depends. If you count DLC, there are games that have greatly outpaced inflation.
The Sims 4 costs nothing for the “base game”, but with all DLC – and that is still coming out – it’s presently about $1,100.
Another factor is that in many cases, the market has expanded. Like, in 1983, it wasn’t that common to see adults in the US playing video games. I am pretty sure that in a lot of countries, basically nobody was playing video games in 1983. in 2023, 40 years later, the situation is very different. The costs of making a video game are almost entirely fixed costs, separate from how many copies you sell.
So…if there is a game out that that many, many other people want to play, it’s going to sell a lot more copies.
I don’t really see the point in getting upset about a price, though – I agree with you on that. I mean, unless the game was misrepresented to you…it’s a competitive market out there. Either it’s worth it to you or it’s not, and if it’s not, then play something else. If someone is determinedly charging some very high price for a game in a genre, and a lot of people want to play that genre and it can be made profitably at a lower price, some other developer is probably going to show up sooner or later and add a competitor to the mix.
Good points made for sure!
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?
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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.
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.
Same, about 0.02 USD per hour at this point, with DLC included. Would be even lower if I had bought the game earlier instead of pirating it for months.
If I enjoy playing the game.
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.
It’s still a valid metric because why would you keep playing a game you’re not enjoying? The number of hours isn’t a measure of how much time it takes to beat, or how much time I feel I should get out of it. It’s how much time I do get out of it.
I don’t care if a $30 game claims to have 100 hours of content. If I only play it for 2 hours before I drop it for being boring, then the cost/time is $15/hour.
I think they’re talking about hours to price that you get from other people or websites. Your personal hours to price of course is worth quite a bit, but there’s no way to know it for sure until you’ve already paid, at which point its use as purchasing advice is already lost.
Project Zomboid
I like the theme, like the ambiance, like the open world, and absolutely hate the combat in that game. Have you ever played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? Same sort of setting and game, but turn-based, and significantly more-complex, and particularly since I see Rimworld on your list, I’m wondering if you might like it.
I’ve seen it mentioned, but havent tried it.
It’s free and open-source (though one of the devs put a build up for $20 on Steam, which basically amounts to a donation). I’d definitely recommend it to someone who enjoys Project Zomboid and Rimworld.
Oh, I had no idea it was open source. I’ll take a look, at the very least. Thanks for the rec!
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:
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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.
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I am often willing to take a punt on a game that tries to do something creative and interesting.
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I tend to not like games that demand a high degree of memorization and/or dexterity.
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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.
I am often willing to take a punt on a game that tries to do something creative and interesting.
take a punt on
scratches head
This has to be one of those cases where British English and American English mean essentially opposite things for the same phrase.
googles
Yup. Well, this goes on the list with “moot”.
Apparently in British English, this is “take a risk on doing something” and in the US it means to skip doing that thing.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/punt-on
to risk money by buying or supporting something, in the hope of making or winning more money
US informal
If you punt on something, you decide not to do or include it:
We punted on a motion that makes no sense.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/punt
(Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, UK) To stake against the bank, to back a horse, to gamble or take a chance more generally
TIL. I guess it makes sense with the British English term “punter”.
I’d argue that it’s ‘punt’ in the sense of to lightly kick something. I’ll give it a punt = I’ll give it its day in court
I definitely agree that you shouldn’t (just) measure a game’s value by playtime. I prefer a shorter game that’s an interesting and exciting experience all the way through over one that is longer, but feels drawn out.
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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.
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.
