Gaming: £ spent to hrs played ratio - what is your opinion?

Omaeka

Omaeka

Omaeka

Soldato
Joined
10 Apr 2012
Posts
8,982
Weird title but I have no idea how to explain it myself. :o

If you buy a game, when do you feel you've gotten your moneys worth? Is it when you've spent one hour per £ paid playing it and enjoying it, or when you complete it?

Personally if I pay £20 for a game and get 20 hours of enjoyment out of it, that's a good win. However some games I'll pay a fiver on for example and hate it or can't get it to run, so I'll chalk it as a loss or something I'll be able to experience at some point in the future, but then something like Dark Souls comes along and I pay £15 for 150 hours and I personally feel as though it makes up for the terrible and/or terribly made games I wasted money on.

Opinions?

Also; Happy New Year. :)
 
I definitely like to get a lot of hours on my games. By coincidence, i don't really play games that you can 'complete'.

I mostly play racing and flight sims, but also some online fps' and strategy games.

The best value game i've ever enjoyed has to be the il2 series of flight sims. Don't even want to know how much time I spent flying that sim. Still do, on and off, and always keep it up to date.
 
Last edited:
Wow i hope EA arent reading thse forums...

I want to pay no more tha £20 and i expect a game to entertain me for a year.

Its easy for game companies to do this these days. In olden times they had to make games 70 hours long (like final fantasy 7 etc)...these days they just give you a 10 hour blast and know they can just throw out some multiplayer options and not have to worry about being creative with new maps/missions etc..lazy
 
Gimpymoo said:
Personally, it is about the quality of gameplay.

I will gladly pay £10 an hour if the gameplay is THAT good.
Click to expand...

Agreed..

Though i spent £30 on Skyrim (release day) and have put just shy of 200 hours into it.. Well worth the money..

Though there are other games where i've only got a Hour per £1.. Most games i've played i've enjoyed though, so not too fussed...
 
danjama said:
I definitely like to get a lot of hours on my games. By coincidence, i don't really play games that you can 'complete'.

I mostly play racing and flight sims, but also some online fps' and strategy games.

The best value game i've ever enjoyed has to be the il2 series of flight sims. Don't even want to know how much time I spent flying that sim.
Click to expand...

Definitely a good way to be to lessen the hit on your wallet. :p

Part of me wishes I just grabbed Civ, Dark Souls and Terraria and nothing else, as they have gigantic amounts of replay value and could have saved me a ton. :(

Gimpymoo said:
Personally, it is about the quality of gameplay.

I will gladly pay £10 an hour if the gameplay is THAT good.
Click to expand...

Hmm, hard to agree with that personally. I bought Deadlight for £4.99 in the sales but it only has a 4-5 hour campaign. Now that to me is satisfactory, but had I not waited in a sale, I'd of been somewhat disappointed paying the full £9.99 regardless of the quality (it is a very good game). Replayability isn't hard to pump into games at all, and some short, yet high quality games could easily of been given artificial replayability such as horde mode in a game like Deadlight.
 
BF2 + BF2Project Reality= £0.003 Per hour :D Based on £20
DFLW = £0.006 Per hour
World of tanks = £0.20 Per hour
Eve Online = £0.60 Per hour
Left 4 Dead = £0.15 per hour

Assorted single player games or mistakes. £0.50- £1 per hour. This is because for single player games i finish ASAP and never play it again, other games get boring or abandoned because something else is better.
 
Around 25,550+ hours playing the original EverQuest over a 10 year spell, I didn't play any other games in that time apart from Age of Empires II/III, Wolfenstein:ET! Now I'm catching up on other games.

£300ish on the game + expansions.
£1,100 on subscriptions.

Estimate of 0.05 pence / hour. lol

Then I had another two accounts I used to box over the last 5+ years lol.

Dreading the thought of what I'll be like when EverQuest 'III' Next is released in the next 12 to 24 months time lol.
 
Last edited:
think it depends on what games you enjoy and how you play them ...

Ive played diablo 3 for many many hours - dont want to know ... but semi quitting here (played it too much).

Skyrim - play hardcore; if you die you are done and restart - thatll keep you going.
 
Nelly said:
Around 150,000+ hours playing the original EverQuest over a 10 year spell
Click to expand...

10 years is only ~87650 hours in total... Even if you got it on day of release and haven't stopped to eat, sleep or use the bathroom since it still wouldn't be close to 150k hours :) Realistically the most anyone can play a game is about 5000 hours a year.

As for the topic I think there needs to be a weighting for quality.... but as a rough guide I'd say that a decent 7/10 game should cost about £2/hr, whereas a real high quality game could be up to £4/hour.

Time spent can be a bit misleading because something like Borderlands has a lot of faffing about (hiking, looting etc) compared to something hi-octane like COD where there is almost constant action. Six hours of Modern Warfare gives a lot more excitement than 6hrs of BL (at least to me).... if I had to pay more than a quid an hour for BL or indeed most RPGs I'd be annoyed.

In terms of when I think I've got my money's worth it's a tough call, generally speaking if I've spent over a tenner than I'll want to see a game through to completion whereas if it was only a few quid then I can live with just a few hours of gameplay.
 
If I pick 5 games up in the sale for £15, and really enjoy one of them and don't much care for the others, I consider that money well spent.

If I'm buying individual games, I usually won't spent more than £4-5. Others I'll be willing to spend £10-15 for before I know I'll enjoy them or have been looking forward to them. Once they are bought, and I start playing with them, I don't think about what I've spent any more- the money is gone.

If I was spending £20-30 to buy each game, then yes I'd definitely be thinking hard about the value, but since most of my games are bought in sales and even when it's a game I really want, I wait for at least a 50%-off deal, I dont have to worry about that.

To the OP, if you often find yourself wondering if the game you're playing was worth the cost, then I'd suggest you are spending too much.
 
Perhaps a good approach would be to look at it from the other angle - what games have we bought that we considered did NOT give good value for money in terms of game length / hours played?

When I tackled this question, what I found was that it was difficult to find many examples of games where the length was a decisive factor in whether I thought it was good or not. I suppose one could argue that if a game is rubbish, you play it less than an hour and so that should be an example, but essentially what I'm driving at is that if the overall game quality is good enough, then very few games will actually annoy me for not having enough content. Some of the Modern Warfare games are very short (~5hrs) and of course it would be nice to have more but I didn't feel like I was being ripped off.
 
Never really equated hours/money in regards to a game or anything like that.

Never really understood it either I know people who will spend hours playing a game not because they enjoy it but because they spent £30 or whatever on it and are trying to get their moneys worth.
 
On console I don't mind what I pay per hour for new games. If I complete it in 8 hours I can usually then sell it on for a couple of quid less than I bought it.

This is the major problem with Steam and digital media in general. It's also why the only way it works is if you buy very cheap in the sale, or buy games that you know you will play for a long time, like Skyrim and BL2 for me.

I dont like to pay anywhere near a £ an hour if i'm honest.
 
Bought nearly all of my 81 games on sale. My steam account is worth £680, but can only have spent around £150 on all of them. Played 312 hours on Cod4, cost me £20.
 
Nelly said:
Around 150,000+ hours playing the original EverQuest over a 10 year spell
Click to expand...
Impressive. I got about 5000 hours (give/take a few hundred) on RS over maybe 6 years. Would love to know where you found so much time :p


Considering i play almost no single player games i get excellent value for money :D Main ones are..

RS - Roughly £200 in membership, ~5k hours
CS:S - £8 i think i paid. 820 hours
MW2 - £30 ~800 hours multiplayer
SC2 - £35? I'd guess 5-600 hours multiplayer
LoL - Free! 3-400 hours so far
PS2 - £8 of ingame stuff so far. 70 hours so far
 
BF3 value for money, never understood the tight gits who refuse to buy the DLC for it, same goes for the wow geeks paying monthly subs.
 
I think as consumers we can certainly be a little too greedy when it comes to hours of gameplay vs money spent.

If you compare the cost of a new movie release on bluray which are usually £15, plus say you went to see said movie at the cinema and paid an extra £7, you are looking at a total expenditure of anywhere from £20-25 for what's usually 1 and a half to 2 hours of entertainment.

Compare that to spending £30 on COD for example which may only have a 7 hour campaign but endless replay ability when it comes to multiplayer it's pretty rude to complain, in my opinion.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom