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 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.