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 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.
Every time this goes on sale, I’m debating on whether to buy it or not. Like you, I’ve never played one of the Ace Combat games before, but some arcade style gameplay could be fun.
Ive been obsessed with The Witness for a few weeks now. Some puzzles are so damn tricky but figuring them out is so pleasurable. This is one of the few puzzle games im actually trying to solve on my own instead of relying on walkthroughs so the experience is very fulfilling
After you finish the witness, you should try The Looker. It's a free parody of the witness that's also pretty good as a puzzle game in its own right. Though, like the witness, I didn't finish it either.
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.
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