The Price of Jollies

[bargora]

Contemplating certain expensive videogames made me think about things from a different perspective. The ratio of the price paid to the time spent enjoying the purchase.

Current-generation games are generally priced at $50 on release, right? Since I'm not good at finishing games, though, I'm not sure how long the average current-generation game provides entertainment. Which I guess usually mean "to finish", since the majority of games these days seem to have definite endings. Although there is a minority of games that are meant to be finished multiple times, or that are meant to be "mastered", whetherthat means that they have no ending, or that they have a scoring system or a grading system that taunts you with "E"s the first few times through.

Anyway, in the end you pay X dollars for a game, and you end up playing it for Y hours. Which I hope means the same thing as enjoying it What kinds of figures for X/Y= are you guys seeing? And what games in particular are really deviating from that average?

(I'm guessing that it's somewhere around $1-2/hour, but that's just my gut feeling.)

[it290]

If you put it that way, PC games like Quake 3, UT2004, or Half-Life are probably the best bang for the buck, since when you get bored with the main game, you can play a bunch of mods.

But yeah, for me, shmups and fighting games tend to have more replayability than anything else, although playing Samurai Shodown a million times doesn't necessarily translate into the 40+ hours you might get out of a good RPG.

[Jorpho]

The vast majority of games I purchase are well under $10. (The most expensive game I purchased in recent memory was Beyond Good & Evil, and that was only $20 - I should have waited just a little longer.)

[SoulBlazer]

I don't usually think about it too much. The way I see it, these days I don't mind buying a game full priced cause I know if I hate it, or if it's a game I finish in a couple months like a RPG, I can sell it used on Amazon for around $30-40. Then I just look at the difference of the money as a 'rental' fee and I'm happy with it. :) And the money I get from selling the game normaly is put right back into a new game.