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 :)
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
If I enjoy playing the game.
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.
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:
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.
I am often willing to take a punt on a game that tries to do something creative and interesting.
I tend to not like games that demand a high degree of memorization and/or dexterity.
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.
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
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/punt
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.
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.
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!
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.
Terraria. Hands down. No other game I've ever played has had the same sheer amount of value for $10 fucking dollars.
A honorable mention would be Stellaris and good ol' Skyrim. But their larger price tag definitely means that Terraria is greater value.
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.
Just about every lengthy series I've seen has had some lemons (which is why I really think that the practice of preordering is a terrible idea).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPn3LIe2e3w
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.
A certain number of hours reached is a fairly easy metric to use and it works great for a lot of games. But let me tell you about Senua's Sacrifice.. that game is short. It was only $20 or something and 8 hours to play through. But it made me ugly cry at the ending. It was so emotionally charged I just sobbed for the girl. That was definitely worth the price.
Valheim at msrp. So. Many. Hours. Such a fantastic game.
Vampire Survivor. So cheap but fun to jump in for a run or six.
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.
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.
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.
$70 for Zelda TOTK, $60 of Baldurs Gate 3, $20 for Factorio. All these games were 100% worth the money.
Many F2P games are worth their price of $0.
Warframe. Rocket League. TF2. Counter-Strike.
The games often become unworthy of the price the moment you spend anything on them tho.
Hey, some of us paid for TF2 via the Orange Box. :P
I paid for all but Warframe 🥹
Ok grandpa, let’s get you to bed.
Jokes aside, I didn’t even know there was a paid version of Counter Strike.
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 like sandbox games and I end up getting so much Value. For factorio I got it for $40 and so every 1000 hours I buy a copy and gift it to someone. Since they have no dlc or any other way to support. Also do the same with rimworld and age of empires 3 DE the main games I have lots of hours in. For league of legends I have 1000s of hours but I won't give them a fucken cent cause I hate the game.
This comment is why more devs should understand the impact selling a game fairly can have on their bottom line. I'm close to 1k in myself, maybe its time to buy the dlc.
I've put SO MUCH TIME into Timberborn
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.
Red Alert & World of Warcraft.
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.
Hades is up there. So many runs, so much content, $25.
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.
The Orange Box.
Probably the last I paid MSRP.
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.
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:
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.
I bought Kerbal Space Program 1 for $14 when it was in version 0.16 I think, before it was in early access on Steam. I've received all updates and DLC for free since then because I got in before a certain date, logged definitely thousands possibly near 10k hours in it, and it is by far the biggest bang for my buck I've ever gotten from a video game ever. Thank you HarvesteR and original dev team!
R&D as an analogy, if the game does something new, creates a new experience then it's worth extra because you can't get it anywhere else until poor copies appear in a few years
Replayability and Flow. Length doesn't matter look at AC games. But I could re run RE games or Respec new build in Elden Ring and feel the rush of making decisions on the fly and anticipating the dodge when an enemy could almost touch me
Beauty, same as movies I guess when you get to experience people's creativity, not in overproduced generic stuff like Amazon or Apple TV shows or Asscreed, but when there is a good art direction. Good design beats out fidelity any time
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.
I hate games with very low playtime or just not very appealing to replay. Some of my best buys:
The ascent, Grim dawn, Shadow tactics blades of the shogun
Currently finishing Deperado's 3 (version 1 and 2 is not very good imo due to incompatible graphics updates).
I'm usually fine with $5/hour if the game is literally fantastic. Lower quality games I hope for more time out of it though.
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.
WHenever I bouoght a game I suppose
@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.
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.
Surprised I haven't seen monster hunter world / iceborn yet. Just a very good fun game to play
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.
For me, it's more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It's a very case by case basis for me.
I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money's worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.
On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.
Honestly its hard to say for me. Generally I dont usually pay full price for games unless its a franchise I know I know I really enjoy and the general critical and user reviews confirm it isnt a dud. I usually dont find myself unhappy with my game purchases though. If Im usure about something I wait for a sale.
Did a quick calculation and found that a 60$ 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.
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.
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.
$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.
When I got my PSX in 1997, the games sure felt like a good deal at $50 after paying $70+ for cartridges for years. I only got one new game per year at full price for my SNES. I also generally felt happier buying on PC because new games were also less than consoles for a while.
Now with the indie scene, there is a lot more variance, even though I also occasionally grab top-shelf releases. I still think FTL might have been the best $10 I've ever spent on a game. At the same time, I paid $60 for Persona 5 Royal right at launch even though I had played the original game, and I still thought it was incredible value.