I joined a Linkshell (guild) in FFXI a few months ago and they’ve been great to me. Everyone is always helping one-another and we run weekly events every Saturday night. I don’t have much of a social life in my 30s so it’s been a great time for me to spend time with folks.
Oh, that sounds pretty sweet. I played quite a bit of FFXI many many years ago. I was late to that party because I played Everquest for so many years, but I had tried FFXI when it launched. It was pretty fun! But just wasn’t enough to pull me away from EQ. But at some point in the late 2000’s I went back and played FFXI for like a year or so on and off. Did you start fresh in FFXI? This piques my interest. I would strongly consider playing again if it’s new player friendly.
I played through Far: Lone Sails and really enjoyed the light puzzle and management of the machine. It was super atmospheric and I really loved the game overall. It was a perfect casual game that really absorbed me into it. Going to play the sequel as well soon.
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.
After mostly playing BG3 lately, I’m now back to Factorio. I figured that since my angelbob mainbuss save passed 1GB, it was time to start something new, so I decided to give Space Exploration a go. I hope to have it completed by the time the space expansion for Factorio is released.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive all had to be paid for. Only the original mod (1.5 and under) and Global Offensive/CS2 have been available freely (and in GO’s case, it came later just like TF2 and RL).
I was livid about 1.6 going retail back in the day. I had been playing the same game for free, as a mod, for at least 2 years prior to that.
Even if you take my spending (which was in the hundreds) on Warframe into account, it was still worth the thousands of hours I put into the game. It’s really just a matter of whether you enjoy the game enough to justify the spending.
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.
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.
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.
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