When was a game's price worth it to you?

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 :)

Rentlar,

$5/hr of playtime to account for hours I may enjoy and not enjoy as much. That puts it on par with a cheap night out.

My favourite games are $0.02-$0.50/hour of play time.

Jinxyface,

WHenever I bouoght a game I suppose

MutatedBass,

Spelunky 2 - $20. One of my all time favorites here. Over 200 hours in, don’t regret any of them. I could easily double my playtime without seeing everything.

Dark Souls 1 - $30(?). Back in my teen years on the 360 I bought Dark Souls without knowing anything about it. I played through it with a buddy, passing the controller on death, and we had a blast. That first run transcends money for me, I would pay anything to keep that memory. Recently that same buddy and I replayed the game together and are now reworking our way through the series.

Racingmaybe - $3. This game is amazing. It’s a turn based drag racing game with an upgrade system. This is the best driving game I have ever played, far and away. It’s a hobby project by a solo developer. At it’s $3 price point this game is well worth the money. Seriously, if you’re reading this, buy it. Or drop your Steam name and I will gift it to you.

Mount & Blade: Warband - $20. This game is really starting to show its age but I still love it. Endless mod potential gives it tons of replayability.

I could go on forever but these ones came to mind first.

mojo,

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

Coskii,
@Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I will buy a game when:

The gameplay is up my alley, or the experience is worth the time invested into it.

And

The final cost of the game after dlc is equal to or less than 1/10th the cost of my PC. Usually aim for 1/20th if I’m iffy about the gameplay.

lemillionsocks,
@lemillionsocks@beehaw.org avatar

Honestly its hard to say for me. Generally I dont usually pay full price for games unless its a franchise I know I know I really enjoy and the general critical and user reviews confirm it isnt a dud. I usually dont find myself unhappy with my game purchases though. If Im usure about something I wait for a sale.

Lojcs,

Did a quick calculation and found that a 60$ game needs to be 35hrs to break even with movie prices edit: *where I live

Although I rarely think about game length when buying games. I find that what my gut says is a justified price is far more influenced by a game’s reputation/store page/reviews/what kid of game I feel like playing at the moment. What I’m pricing is my perception of an experience, not an amount of enjoyment for an amount of time. After I buy a game then unless it’s unexpectedly bad or broken I don’t really think about whether it was worth the price. Edit: In fact for longer games I find myself thinking if it was worth the time more.

I think it’s worth mentioning that I don’t buy games with a hype wave behind them, so the “perception of experience” is closer to the actual experience than if you apply the same to new releases.

For game length, I find that left to my own devices I like when games are 10-20 hrs in length. For longer games I prefer when there’s a driving story that I can strive for, and even then it gets boring around the 30-40 hr mark. Some open ended games captivate me for 100+ hours but that’s not my expectation from a game.

I see that people are shouting out games in the comments, so I’ll add one. Cyber Hook is a fantastic runner/platformer game. It’s really fun (especially the beginning and dlc) and it’s pretty cheap. It’s not very long especially if you don’t bother getting good times in levels but the experience alone is worth it. Although, for some reason it requires internet connection for game progression so take that into account when buying too.

lemillionsocks,
@lemillionsocks@beehaw.org avatar

Did a quick calculation and found that a 60$ game needs to be 35hrs to break even with movie prices edit: *where I live

How much do tickets cost where you live? Even using older $10 per seat prices and an average run time of 2 hours I come down to $5/hr. Also probably not just going out to a theater alone so if you’re bringing a date or your family, or even going with friends for a collective experience that balloons quite a bit.

Lojcs,

Saw oppenheimer the other day, it was 145₺ ($5) for 3hrs. For other movies the price seems proportional. Tbh triple A games typically cost $30-40 here so the break even comes down to 20-25 hrs.

I had only considered the price for my seat as friends pay for their seats. Ofc this is also not considering popcorn etc, those increase the cost quite a bit.

amju_wolf,
@amju_wolf@pawb.social avatar

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.

BmeBenji,

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.

Faydaikin,
@Faydaikin@beehaw.org avatar

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.

Sivick314,
@Sivick314@universeodon.com avatar

@berg honestly, when it tells me a good story, either through traditional storytelling or when it's through my own emergent gameplay.

Games that aren't going to do that aren't even worth downloading for free.

MangoKangaroo,

I think it definitely depends on the sort of game. I don’t mind paying AAA pricing for a game that actually feels like the studio gave a rat’s ass about providing good value. BG3, for example, was very much worth what I paid for it even just with the ~100 hours I got out of my first playthrough.

Of course, there have also been value kings that I’m not sure will ever be beaten for me in terms of price to hours played. Minecraft and Terraria are good examples here. I got Minecraft during either late Infdev or early Alpha, and so I paid fuck all compared to the current price. Considering I’ve probably put tens of thousands of hours into that shitshow in the over 13 years that I’ve played it, and I’d say it’s more than been worth it. The same goes for Terraria. At 1.5k hours of playtime and counting, it’d’ve been worth it to me even at far more than the $10 price tag that I (probably) got it at way back when.

So tl;dr, I’d say that if a game is truly well-made and enjoyable, then I don’t mind paying whatever the devs need to charge to keep their doors open. Bonus points if I can purchase the game DRM-free somehow.

rothaine,

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

Xoury,

Surprised I haven’t seen monster hunter world / iceborn yet. Just a very good fun game to play

comicallycluttered,

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.

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