Worth the price

[ctdc67]

How many hours of playing a game does it pay for itself? Not counting the overall experience so much but with a game you consider a 7/10.

 

[r_outsider]

You know, this is a very good and tough question. This one's going to bother me for days.

 

[Dave A]

Depends on initial expectations and how much you paid for the game as well as how engaged you were in the time playing the game. In other words, it will vary greatly, there's no magic formula that applies to all games.

 

[MatskiMonk]

How many hours of playing a game does it pay for itself? Not counting the overall experience so much but with a game you consider a 7/10.

The way I look at it... averaging out how I spend my time when not gaming, it all costs about £8.20 per hour. Assuming I deem this acceptable value for money, that would indicate 8-9 hours for a £70 game. A physical game of course retains a portion of its value, so probably 4-5 hours if I end up selling it.

In practice, my two most played games work out at 5-10p per hour. Indie games from Steam work out at anywhere between 1p/hour and £1/hour. Two games I've bought but rarely play for the PS5 give a cost per hour £17.50 and £21.66 per hour... which makes them about as an expensive way of spending my time as having a meal in an average restaurant.

Another way of looking at it, is to consider if I spend more time playing it than I did earning the money to pay for it... which means anything between 30 mins and 5 hours would be acceptable.

I recently baulked at the idea of getting Tekken 8 because it's £70 just for a bit of button bashing, but having just worked all this out, I'm thinking I might manage 10 hours out of it.

 

[ctdc67]

Some games I play a lot of the $70 price tag is a steal. I mean if I was to put them hours in a bowling alley or golfing my bill would be staggering. Not that I want to tip off these companies 😜

 

[kjb]

For me I usually buy games that I know I am going to play a lot so I usually get my money's worth out of most games. I rarely pay full price for games so that helps the value proposition. So I normally look to get 30 hours out of games to be worth it for me

 

[ctdc67]

So if you buy a game for $30 and play it for 30 hours it’s worth $1 an hour

 

[TypeRDC5]

As someone who has a mortgage and kids my theory is usually that if it works out at least £1 per hour played then it was money well spent otherwise its just too expensive.

For single player story games which I know I won't go back to I sell it on after I complete it and lose very little money if any at all.
For example I bought Spider man 2 used for £40 and sold it 3 weeks later for £40, basically played it for free, it's still £70 on the psn store...

Games like gran turismo, battlefield, cities skylines, cyberpunk etc I have hundreds of hours in so in those cases £60 would be well worth it.

 

[RX-7_FD3S]

I dont see a game value like that. For me, if I enjoy playing it even if it's 5 hours for a game I've paid 60 dollars I'm fine with it, happen quite a lot during the ps2/ps3 days when I was buying japanese games.

However, if I pay 5 dollars and end up not liking the game, I feel like my money is wasted.