Amount of hours from a game?

Soldato
Joined
17 Jun 2012
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Just looking at my Steam library, I have 65 games and only a handful have more than 15 hours on them, most of them less than 10.

Was just wondering how many hours you expect to get from a purchase before you feel you've had good value from it?
 
Probably at least 15 hours for most games, though for a single player story game that I bought at a discount, I would expect 10 hours or so.
 
In my top 5 games by hours played only one game cost me more than £15 and that was pubg which is currently 4th and will no doubt make it in to my top 3.

It's quite surprising how few games that are classed as AAA titles i don't get my monies worth from.
I have 312 games on my list, and only the top 20 have over 30 hours played.
Out of that 20 only a max of 3 games cost me £30+ and in my list i've got quite a few "AAA titles"

So I'm rarely getting £1 per hour worth out of a lot of games. Glad i looked into this as a new perspective on buying games in the future....
 
Full price single player I'd expect (though often don't get) at least 30 hours out of it - for something with MP and/or mixed single player and online content I'd expect more like 100s of hours.
 
I dont really put hours on a game as a way to feel as if I get value from it, I'd personally put it down to if I enjoyed the game/was it engaging etc
 
I'm actually doing ok because I have just had the codes from my Zen/ROG bundle through and chose Assassin's Creed Origins and P/Cars 2, so they haven't cost me anything and I'm still playing Ghost Recon Wildlands which I'm really enjoying (campaign) and that was a free code also. I haven't bought a game of any sort in over 12 months.

But I was looking at my list and there's lots with less than an hour on them and some fairly big titles with less than 5 hours and thought I'd not had much VFM out of them.
 
Depends on the game.
Anything at £pint an hour or less is a bargain in my book.
Anything over £2pints is too much.
 
I expect 15 - 20 hours. I'm delighted with more than that, disappointed between 10 and 15 and annoyed with less. There are of course exceptions such as Indie games like Inside, What Remains of Edith Finch, etc but these games tend to cost less and you don't expect them to be as long. I hate these 4-6 hour campaigns that come with the likes of Call of Duty - ok multiplayer is the main part of those games for many but I personally can't be bothered with online multiplayer. It's why I won't pay more than £5 for such games. Origin Access is good in that respect, recently played and enjoyed the single player campaigns in Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1 using it which I likely wouldn't have bought for another few years until they're selling for next to nothing...
 
Most of my games with significant hours in them are multiplayer. They become more of a social tool rather than a game at that point. I'm not a huge fan of PUBG but I have 200+ hours in it because that is what my friends are playing now.

Most single player games I get about 10 hours out of. Sometimes I will play a game halfway and then put it down only to restart with a fresh save months later.

This has happened with Project Cars. I put about 6 hours into that game at launch and found I didn't play it much due to my friends not being into racing games and other multiplayer games taking up my evenings. But since I picked up a Rift I've got 20 hours in it already and I've purchased a wheel to get more out of the game. I've also got the same thing with Dirt Rally so I'll be playing a lot more of that soon.

Most of the time I expect about £1 per hour of gameplay to feel that I've gotten my money's worth. That's why I usually hold off for a sale to purchase single player games.
 
Depends entirely on the game really. Large open world RPG's could expect 100's of hours (witcher 3 / Metal Gear solid) for the better ones, maby 50-100 for others (Ghost Recon Wildland) . Mostly campaign driven with pretty linear story, 10-15 hours.

Games I generally get good value from have been the larger RPG's, Strategy or ones with large multiplayer components.

Longest played games to date for me has been BF2 back in the day and Elder Scrolls Online, both at 1000 hours +.

A quid an hour for me is reasonable value.
 
As already said, it depends on the game. I put 200+ hours into Metal Gear V and got more than my money worth. Not sure if I enjoyed those 200+ hours, but still.
 
Played games like The Park & Brothers: A tale of two sons that were only 1-2 hours & got value from them, other games I've had hundreds or thousands of hours & definitely got value out of them. It depends on how good/entertaining the game is overall, but length doesn't hurt ;)

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Generally for me its £1 an hour. So if I pick it up for £30 , I expect a minimum of 30 hours, if I grab it for £15, then I expect a minimum of 15 hours. As with all things, there are exceptions... Alien Isolation I thought was superb but I completed it in under 15 hours. Linear story based single player games will generally always have a reduced number of hours played before completion.
 
Depends on the game. If it's single player, then I'll get through it on hard mode but I won't spend much time trying to unlock everything or find all the filler items they throw in, etc. That will be enough for me at the typical new game price point. I probably won't play it again for at least a year too. If it's MP and I like it (like CS:GO), then I'll likely put in hundreds of hours.
 
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£1 per hour in a story driven high quality game with little to no replayability.
£1 per 2 or so for an RPG type game, mainly because they get abit copy pastey to fluff out the content so you expect them to be long, and rarely have huge quality to them (god bless Witcher 3 - a true standout of the genre)
Multiplayer driven games like Tekken CoD etc. probably expect 80-120 hours min just because they generally don't have that much new content with each release and are quite confined in what you can do, but highly replayable.

Hard to say for the rest, ARK having 2400 hours for me is mental though, at £25 that's what... 1 pence an hour? Lmao. Though for the pure sandbox games with no structure like that, you'd probably want 200+ if it grips you by the time you're done, just because they're quite easy to pile up content without much thought.

Hard to say honestly, but it's very difficult to justify less than say 40 hours of good content for a £39.99 title, which puts pressure on developers if we're honest especially with time constraints. Not hard to see why so many developers just cave and make their games open world pseudo-RPGs now, it's very easy to fluff the content out so people feel like they have value from their purchases. Even games like Evil Within and God of War are going that route even though they had highly repayable content despite being linear.
 
Depends on the game. An open world RPG, well you should be talking hundreds of hours. A FPS single-player campaign or RTS campaign should be around the 20-30 hour mark. As for MMORPGs, let's just say more than athe previous two - WoW about 5000hrs, GW & GW2 combined are at about 7000 and EVE Online is 13 years and counting. :D
 
I think there are just too many games now. We have a choice of thousands to play from and more are released daily than at any other time in history.

Is this necessary a good thing though?

Nintendo don't have a track record of releasing a glut of games every year. They can wait many years before releasing a sequel and perhaps it is that artificial scarcity that make some of their games more cherished. You know it will be a long time before you will play anything similar so you will feel compelled to play a current game for longer than you would possibly have done if a new sequel is due next year.

All of us are saying the same things about our playing habits. We frequently play a handful of games for a very long time and have a list of games with very few hours sunk into them. So why is that?

Is it that we are buying them on impulse and just not enjoying them? Are other games just so much better and take all of our time?
 
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