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.
Been playing Mario Wonder that last 2 days, but I gotta put it down and finish The Legend of Zelda: The Monish Cap. I was on the last dungeon. Great game, I don’t know why I waited so long to play it.
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.
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.
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.
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 guess I take for granted that extended time spent in the game contributes more to the subjective value. Otherwise, why play? Of course there are a plethora of reasons to keep playing. But if we disregard that for now.
There are edge cases. E.g. a lovely small title that isn’t replayable and barely three hours long. That one could bring the average up a bit, depending on the price. But I’m not asking for a universal rule, rather where the ratio starts to hurt subjectively for people.
Or well, I guess what I really wanted to know is how people compare the price of games to other recreational joys. Especially considering the timespan of the compared activities. Though maybe a bit poorly phrased. :)
For me personally, I tend to compare it to movies. I have no problem going out and paying $15-20 to go be entertained for 2-3 hours. By that metric, a $60 game needs to keep me entertained for maybe 10 hours for me to feel like it wasn’t a complete waste of money.
As I alluded to before, I tend to also value how entertained I am during that time. A good movie or a good game doesn’t have to be long to be worth the price of admission. And conversely, there are games that I have more time into that I feel like were not worth the price (coughDiablo4cough) but I kept playing because of a combination of sunk cost fallacy and trying to find what all those other people thought was so good.
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 helped co-found a guild back when WOW was new - I was the guild webmaster. The guild never really got that big or active, but here it is 20 years later and I still occasionally get credit card offers in the mail for “The Blackrazor Brotherhood.”
Some of my favorite gaming memories are from my time in a guild called The Sylvan Guard on an EverQuest server around 1998 or so. It was a small guild but the last time I saw a question similar to this posted, on Reddit a few years ago, I checked in and so did a former guild-mate I hadn’t spoken with in decades.
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.
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.
Oh of course I never pre-order, but Zelda and Mario have not had any bad main games in the past decade so I don’t feel worried about buying them on release.
I already have enough zillion-hour games to grind, I don't need every game to be that. As much as I love JRPGs I have a hard time setting aside time to finish one these days since I have too much else I also want to play.
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.
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.
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