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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

If I enjoy playing the game.

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.

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.

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.

Vampire Survivor. So cheap but fun to jump in for a run or six.

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.

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.

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.