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How Do You Measure a Game's Worth?
RamblingJosh writes "Video games can be very expensive these days, especially with so many great games on the horizon. So I wonder: how exactly do you get the most gaming entertainment for your dollar? '... the first thing I personally thought about when approaching this was money spent versus time played. Using Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions as an example: I bought the game for about $30 Canadian, and played it for roughly 85 hours. That comes out to 2.83 hours per dollar spent, a pretty good number. In this case, the game was a lot of fun and it was cheap, and so the system works fairly well. There are so many other things to think about, though. What if the game wasn't so good? What about the fact that it's portable? ... What about the new content? Multiplayer?'"
Time spent playing (per dollar) seems like a good measurement. If a game has other advantages beyond being good, such as being a mobile phone game you can play while sitting bored on a train, then that will cause you to play it more. Everything naturally factors in.
Of course, values between different people aren't comparable due to different tastes and amounts of time available to play games, and it's virtually impossible to work out in advance how many hours you will play the game for, but it's a good way to quantify a game's value.
(time played in hours/2 x metacritc score)/4 being portable doesn't change the value of the game, but does lower the cost of the platform.
The new Silent Hill game for the Wii, Shattered Memories, was amazingly good; innovative, deep, intelligent... and maybe 8 hours long. $7.50 an hour. Absolutely worth it, in the sense a great movie is, even though it fails the $/hour test.
On the other hand, a good strategy game, like any of the incarnations of Fire Emblem, can easily top a hundred hours. The metric has to be total enjoyment... and fond remembrance of the game counts into that total. Hell, the game is probably worth an extra quarter if it generates a decent slashdot post.
can only be measured by how many times it has gotten you laid.
Ive had 2 WOW hookups since ive been playing.
WOW: 2
every other game: 0
How long am I going to play this game for? Is it going to pull me back in at some point in the future? How much thought will I put into playing this game? (The more the better)
Replayability is usually determined by the level of customization offered. Being able to play the game in a different way usually changes a mediocre experience into a fantastic one.
A good example of a game I come back to often is Civilization 4. It has lots of fantastic mods, is fairly open ended and allows you to play the game in many different ways without forcing you into a single strategy or objective. RPGs usually have a fairly high replay value as well.
Hours per dollar is an excellent measurement.
If the game has a predefined mission (most FPS) a good measurement is if you can play through the game without losing your temper or caving in. One game that promised high playability was Tomb Raider Anniversary - but at one point (elevator before lava caves) it becomes tough and complex enough that only the best could finish it. So if you manage to actually finish the game, that's a good measurement of quality since finisheing a game gives the player a sense of accomplishment. Unlike the sense of utter failure he experiences if unable to finish (which should give a healthy negative score).
An example of a game with a very high h/$ score must be Unreal Tournament 2004. I still play the bugger, still try out new maps and still burn a couple of hours a week playing a relaxing onslought against the bots. I'd say the $/h ratio is somewhere in the area :)
This signature is DRM protected. By the DMCA, you are not allowed to counteract or oppose to it.
Camping on quad since 1996.
I bought Torchlight at $4.99 for the Steam deal back then. Best. Value. Ever. I give it 50 units of Awesome. Dragon Age: Origins gets 75 Awesome, but costs obviously more. In terms of a purchase decision, I actually hesitated for DAO. Steam's got it right with their deal system, sapping mah wallet dry.
Maybe not everything has to have a fucking number attached to it. Just enjoy things and let them be. Does knowing Street Fighter had a pleasure quotient of 3.64 change anything about the time you spent playing it?
uuuhm. I mean whether or not I returned it to my local retailer an hour after installing.
The truth is, you can only measure it after you've played the game, and not before. And so the only way to find out whether the game will be any good is by reading reviews. Still there is a possibility that the experience of the person who reviewed the game, and even the average experience of the people who reviewed it may not match your own. It's the same for movies, music, pictures and other works of art.
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
This Bash quote is quite fitting here.
Hours per dollar is only a way to measure the quantity of enjoyment, not the quality. Take Braid, which i completed in a few hours. Compare it to World of Warcraft which i have spent way way too much time on. I probably got a lot more game time per dollar from WoW, but the enjoyment i had when playing Braid was much greater, even with no replayability or online multiplayer. I am worried games these days often forego the quality part and focus too much on the quantity.
...if you remember the game after 2-3 years, it is good.
is priceless.
I'd rather play a really exciting game for ten hours than a mediocre game for thirty hours.
No sig today...
The sole amount of time spent playing a game doesn't consider the parts of the game that didn't entertain or were even frustrating. I guess you can't just substract these "wasted" hours either because a 20 hour game without any frustrating parts is likely to entertain you more than a 30 hour game that includes 10 hours of frustration. It depends a lot on how much your free time playing games is worth to you in the first place. It may even be worth so much that you enjoy a five minute Solitair game a lot more than going through five minutes of just learning the controls of any other game, as an extreme example. The location of the bad game parts is also important as five minutes of frustation every now and then are less likely to decrease your entertainment than a bad two hour part in one go, especially if that were your only two hours of playtime that weekend.
Easy; each game is worth 99 cents.
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Hours per [currency]
The longer a game can last, the better.
Does the game actually work?
How well is it? Are there any silly bugs or horrible controls that ruin the gameplay?
Is the gameplay itself up to a decent standard?
Work or play?
Fun is always a good thing in games. But challenges are always welcome too.
Does the game find the right balance between fun and annoyingly hard?
I like my challenges, but something near-enough impossible without a guide or extreme levels of trial and error just become annoying.
It the game actually challenging and not dumbing it down to lower the entry level? (something that has happened a LOT on Wii sadly...)
"Replayability"
Does it let you continue on after "completing" main game?
Does it give you any incentive to replay the game? Such as extra options, stats or items, or the usual extra endings?
Does the game have an active landscape, rather than boring dull static landscape?
Does it force you through an area more than a few times? (more than 4 is really stretching it, MMO and open-landscape type games are exempt in this case)
Uniqueness
I don't think there is much to say in this.
Any innovation in the game is usually a good thing, even something as small as how to assign points to characters. (Sphere Grids of FFX took the FF points assigning out of the usual menus and numbers for example)
Graphics and audio
Does it fit well with the game? Even contrasting colors with the theme are good, such as Disney-bright primaries with an ultra-violent game.
Multiplayer (if none, is ignored)
Decent multiplayer system? Easy to setup games?
Online play? Able to setup your own servers? Or is it through some owned server? Or both?
In both cases, do the games run just as smoothly as each other?
Free? Decent Fees? Pay-per-play plan? (one reason i refuse to play most MMOs, i'm not going to have the time to play ~15/7/365!)
I have about 12-15 different games,dated from the 1930's to the 1950's, there are a couple that are in great shape but most of them are falling apart pretty badly or they have some game piecs missing.I'd like to sell them all as one lot. Proactol Force Factor
This means that a generally amusing game that takes 30 hours to complete is better value than the best game ever that takes 29 hours to complete.
It's like judging the quality of a book by the number of pages.
$2 per hour is about as cheap as a hobby can get. Only watching TV might be cheaper, but that doesn't count, and even gaming can get that cheap, too, by playing an online-game for 200 hours month and just paying $10.
So why even bother?
But it's not the only metric. Let's ponder all those hours spent in FPS games with the old "get key from location A, run to location B on the other end of the map, get Key for A again" spiel. That's no fun and simply a time sink. We did it for a single reason: To get it behind us so we can continue having fun. So I'd propose that those hours of "tedium" should be subtracted from the "play time", or even count against the play time that could be considered "fun time".
The best game would obviously not be repetitive or, if it is, still be enjoyable while you repeat yourself. All games are repetitive to some degree. The interface only has so many options, as do AI or gameplay. Gaining new weapons (FPS) or units (RTS) can either be just another set of tools or a completely new experience, and that's something to consider when pondering the value. Getting an automatic gun compared to your old repeating shotgun in a FPS can alter the style of game, or it can just be a necessity if the enemies just get harder to reflect this. Essentially, if the old gun becomes useless in every aspect once you have the new gun because it is simply no longer a viable choice, it's a bad development. You did not get a new option, you just got a new skin. Likewise, RTS. If new units make the old ones obsolete, you did not get new units. You only got a replacement and basically have to play with the same amount of choices you had before. New skins, but no new options.
I like it when games guide you into the play style, when you start out with a limited set of options to get to know the interface and all, and then it expands from there. giving you more and more options over time (preferably giving you the option that you wished you had when you finally get it without engineering the situation to require this option. Usually that means it is only a viable option in very specific, almost necessarily artificially created situations). But those should be options. Not requirements.
And that's just me. I, for one, could not stomach the item grind of games like WoW, but appearantly that's something a good deal of people enjoy. My metric for a "good game" is probably not the same you would use. For me it has to give me more and more options over the course of the game. When I get no new options, the fun starts to decline and the repetition starts. Multiplayer can help here a lot, given that a human opponent is harder to figure out and requires you to adapt your strategy to stay on par with him, but a computer AI will eventually be figured out fully and you will develop a winning strategy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If a game is great, I don't think the price you paid matters at all. I paid $15 for Braid on Xbox Live Arcade late 2008 and absolutely loved it. I saw the game for like $2 on the Steam sale over the holiday and was just smiling at how cheap it was now because so many more people would try it out. It didn't seem to matter to me at all that I paid almost eight times more than the current asking price.
Of course, that game was only $15 to begin with.
I'm getting the collector's edition of Mass Effect 2 on Tuesday, that's a $70 drop but I'm honestly confident the game is going to rock and that price will be irrelevant in the long run. If the game sucks, at least I can jump on the reseller's market early.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I think the question it self is flawed. Your trying to assign a quantitative number to a game as if it represents some level of value that you can extract at a later date. A game isn't a used car. A car can be worth $100 or it can be worth $20,000. A game has only 2 choices. It's worth it, or it's not. The problem is that it is an individual test of worth so your standards of worth it or not worth it, or even any number system you can come up with, are going to be completely irrelevant to me. People can spend hours on end playing Bejeweled or any other time waster type game and it can be completely worth the time spend playing it because they enjoyed it the entire time. Personally I don't thing it's worth it because I don't enjoy those types of games for very long. So all ready there is inconsistency in the "worth" of a game and I'm just referring to free flash games. I haven't even brought in money yet.
Once you start talking about money, in the end your only going to spend what you can afford. Everyone earns different amounts of money and has different responsibilities. A teen living at home may not have a problem dropping an entire pay cheque on rock band where an older adult with a mortgage and kids will be more particular about spending money. Of course the more money you have the less value money has. If your a millionaire you will be more willing to throw away money on crappy games than someone making minimum wage so again this value of worth is meaningless to anyone else but yourself.
Personally a game is worth it if I really enjoyed playing it but the experience is enhanced by friends that play the same game. We can talk about the game afterwords and share experiences and even play multiplayer games together which is more enjoyable than random strangers online. If your looking to get value out of a game, buy games that your friends have that you can play together. If you want to stretch you money, buy single player games your friends don't have and you can trade and borrow games with each other so you can experience more.
If your looking for advice on games to buy, look to your friends. If your trying to evaluate what you already have, your over thinking it.
DRM makes the game worth less. Online activation makes the game 50% less worthy, limited online activation makes the game another 50% less worthy.
It'd be interesting to see this metric applied to pay-monthly MMOs such as WoW, Eve etc - but then you really do have to take into consideration satisfying gameplay per dollar, and I think the result will be 'not much'.
Lew
I've never really felt the need to scrutinize an experience and boil down its dollars to hours-of-enjoyment ratio. You can of course - there are a lot of factors you could take into account - but generally speaking I find if I enjoyed the game, it was worth the cost.
If you find yourself questioning whether or not the game was worth it, it probably wasn't.
I know I like a game when I've played too much of it. I really liked Fallout 3 and every time I hear about the "National Mall" I'm automatically thinking about mutants. Also, I once picked one of my wife's hair clips, just in case I needed later.
For games with a beginning, middle and end - I'm grateful if they're short. 8 hours or so is good. So dollars/hour is not a good metric for me. I'd rather quality than quantity.
Replay value is always welcome, of course - but it depends on the type of game. I'm all for something I can buy, *really* enjoy for 8 hours, then trade in.
For me $10/hour of actual fun, is better than $1/hour of tedious grinding. Of course some people enjoy grinding... weirdos.
So there are some games that I continue to play years after they come out due to the mod community. Half Life 2 and Battlefield 2 are two that have to be into the pennies per hour by now; I don't even have an estimate. That said, if you look at the direction COD-MW2 decided to take, from a single player perspective, you see the cost per hour go way up. Multiplayer certainly improves the value but the plan is to control development of maps/mods and charge for them, so the long-term value does not improve for the gamer, only the company.
Everything is worth, what its purchaser will pay for it.
... it gives here on Earth?
Some games don't have any replay value, but are still worth the price. If I'm buying something like an FPS/RTS, I care a lot about the time/money ratio. But I've also enjoyed games like Mass Effect, or the indie game Machinarium, which were pointless after the first time through. The quality of the experience is worth it some times.
It's however much you are willing to pay for the game. Done.
Seriously. One of the beautiful things about economics and capitalism is this principle of encapsulating the value of something with a price. Different people look for different virtues in an object. You might think time played is the correct measurement but a long game that goes bad in the end might be less valuable to me than a good, short and fun game. It's all relative but we can all get to common unit of worth through by stating the price.
If after $30 for the game and playing it, you regretted it, then it was worth less than $30. If you were happy about it, then it was worth more than $30 to you. What the game can sell for in a free market is what it is worth. That's the beauty of a free market. It's not just an exchange for goods and services, it's a good information discovery tool.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
These days I've become skeptical of videogames. When they're all self-masturbatory derivative affairs, do "playtime" or "features" really tell the whole story of worth? Or even at all? What about their meaning or impact on the player? I've started judging worth of videogames based on how seriously they take themselves as a medium for communication. If a game can stand on its own two legs and say something to a person who isn't a hardcore gamer, then that's valuable.
Now, that's not something quantitative like the OP seems to be looking for, but as far as I'm concerned, Braid or World of Goo are both worth just as much as Final Fantasy Tactics even though FFT may have had 4-5x more "playtime". I still, more than a year later will ruminate on some of the themes in these games, and the mental spaces and emotions they elicited from me, and that's a value you can't quantify.
At the same time, I disagree with having this perception that value scales based on what "bonuses" or additional play features it provides me. I was never one to buy a DVD for special features, and I'm not one to buy a videogame now for special gameplay modes or whatever. I wouldn't pay more than $25 for any game, regardless, but then I am also a poor graduate student so that's probably a factor as well.
I think you just have to play a game. You either enjoy it or you don't. Cost per time may work in most instances but I wouldn't have said Street Fighter 2 was less worthy than Tetris just because I've played Tetris longer or that Portal wasn't very enjoyable despite being very short.
De gustibus non est disputandum
Gaming experience is highly subjective, and therefore there is no way to measure it. Therefore you are attempting to measure a subjective gaming experience by measuring objective quantities associated with a game: time played versus cost of game, etc. However these are not necessarily indicators of a good gaming experience, any number of other subjective variables come into play, such as attention span, willingness to become involved in the game world or user interface, etc.
In other words, you could pay professionals to do expensive market research into what makes a "good" game rather than just asking slashdot, and still walk away with doubts - because after all there's always the chance that 1) people who are willing to take time to answer surveys and participate in research do not necessarily represent your target market and 2) people lie on surveys.
There's no sure thing to any business venture - it always involves risk. Common sense (and looking at past successes) should tell the game maket what people want. But if you stick to that, you'll just keep making newer versions of the same product, the gamers will get bored. So innovation is also necessary. But there's no way to be absolutely certain about what makes a "good" game. Usually when you try to make everyone happy, however, you end up disappointing everyone. Look at a game like Falcon 4.0: it never sold much, it was over priced, and it was complicated as hell. And yet no other fighter jet simulation comes close, it has a loyal fan base, it has been modded so far from the original that several different, stand alone games now exist based on the old original Falcon 4. We're talking over 10 years later, which is a lifetime for computer games, and many people (myself included) still play it. But it's a niche game, with very loyal (but very few) followers. Then look at something (I will stick to combat sims) aimed at a broader market: Combat Flight Simulator 3. Without modding, it is generally considered a flop for many reasons, despite having an adequate user interface, adequate flight models, adequate graphics, etc. However it did not excel at anything. It tried to please the arcade type gamer and the "hard core" gamer, and failed at both.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The only thing hours played tells you is how much time you've sat in front of the game.
This would, for instance, make EVE in every way a better game then, say Trine.
I however like Trine much more than I like Eve.
We live in a society where you can have fun pretty much 24/7, except for when doing dishes or when I work, I don't get bored.
I've got weeks worth of sci-fi shows to watch, almost an eternal amount of gameplay from different games.
So, a game which makes me play it for hours upon hours isn't necessarily good, it's just time consuming.
So, I'd rather have really fun for a couple of hours than I'd have an eternal kind off ok game, it's just simply more meaningful.
Of course, there are exceptions like Alpha Centauri which is awesomely fun and very time-consuming, those are the ones which I place on piedestals as masterpieces.
Starcraft would be another such game, as would Baldur's Gate 1+2.
So, no, time-consuming does in no way mean that it's worth more, not unless you have endless of hours to waste and need stuff to do.
Also, social games are kinda strange since you pay to spend time with people, which you could quite easily do for free.
Seriously, if you start to break down the worth of a game to $/h you might as well take a stab at the exciting & noble art of accountancy. ... and by that logic it's PRICELESS to pirate a game.
How about rating games in how many money you would have spent on it?
Ethical piracy is the solution: download the game, crack it (if it needs) and start playing it. If you like it, pay for it.
If you didn't like it, just delete it.
It's simple: 1. You average decent game that will give the acerage gamer at least several months of enjoyment (Example: Team Fortress 2): $50 2. Any game that didn't turn out quite right... or a game that is just a mod of another game (Example: Soldier of Fortune series): $30 3. All Major MMOs (Example: WOW, LOTRO, EVE): FREE!!! With a $15 monthly sub... these games do not need a barrier to players even starting them when the player knows they will only get 30days of play out of the game right out of the box. They are idiots for charging for the box) Micro transactions kill your player base eventually and keep away really dedicated players. Stop trying to milk us. They may make each player worth more but those players will start leaving in greater and greater numbers when they get sick of the treatment. 4. Indie MMOs: (Example: Wurm) Free to play, with special severs for those of us that want more that cost $8/month to play or so. If this amount of money isn't enough to pay the bills then you either A. Spent to much making the game or B. Made a game that sucks and you don't have enough player base. In most cases both are true.
If you want to stretch you money, buy single player games your friends don't have and you can trade and borrow games with each other so you can experience more.
You assume that all games are sold as discs or cartridges with no online activation. With the rise of Wii Shop Channel, PSN Store, Xbox Live Marketplace, Apple's App Store, Steam, and various schemes that limit the number of times a game can be activated online, video game publishers are doing a good job of attacking the used video game market.
If your looking for advice on games to buy, look to your friends.
How do I get those?
My measure of a game's value is how many features find their way into my own games, stories and conversations.
I know my opinion is probably an anomaly, but I hate dead entertainment that one just experiences then never uses - if it's just some time-passing endorphin rush, it's as pointless as taking drugs.
You determine a game's worth by how fun it is. (Obviously, this varies with the tastes of the user.)
So, how can you find out without dropping a fortune on a questionable title? First, don't buy new right off the bat. If possible, either wait for a demo or rent a title before purchasing. Also, hold off for about 3-4 months following the release date. This is about the point where stores begin discounting these titles by up to 50%.
Finally, check sites like DealNews for updates on special pricing, or find a reliable store online that routinely offers cheap prices on titles you want. (Personally, I've found GoGamer to have fantastic discounts on new titles in their 48hr Madness section... sometimes by as much as $20 below average pricing on new titles.)
8==8 Bones 8==8
I'm 30. I still love playing video games, and if surveys are to be believed, 50% of people who agree are even older than I am. That means many of them also have long work hours, decent pay, wives and/or children, home and extended family responsibilities...
And it means that we're all experienced enough and wise enough to recognize "filler" for what it is. A repetitive level that tacks an hour onto gameplay may decrease the "dollars per hour" spent on the game, but it's not going to win you any new fans or get any extra purchasers for your sequel.
When you play a game, you get enjoyment/fun/insight/whatever (call it goodness), but in order to get that you sacrifice money (the price) but you also sacrifice time. Maybe it's just me, because I have a job that pays well but takes lots of time, but time is usually more important than money. If a game provides the same total fun but lasts 20 hours instead of 40, I'd easily pay 2-3 times as much.
Hours needs to go in the denominator not the numerator. For instance: value = hours / dollars is wrong. Value = goodness / (hours * dollars) is much better.
A deck of cards, only $2 or $3 to buy, offers hundreds of hours of play. Plus, if you win at Poker it's an income source!
"Intelligence is like four wheel drive, it gets you stuck in more remote places" --Garrison Kiellor
"Video games can be very expensive these days..."
I always seem to chuckle a bit when I hear or read this. Games may be expensive, but they are no where near the prices I remember paying for a lot of games I bought back when the SNES was new. $80 for Final Fantasy 3, $70 for Secret of Mana, heck I think I paid $60 for Killer Instinct. Game prices may be expenses on the 360 and PS3 compared to the prices of last generation games, but they are not as bad as they used to be.
I use a negative rating the lowest score is the best game.
Sucklitude scale rating of 0 to 11. 11 sucks the most, none higher, 0 is worth playing, 5 or 6 is meh, 1 to 3 might be worth it used to buy.
I rate politicians by Hitlertude by how much like Hitler they are, or Stalintude by how much like Stalin they are.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
But it IS a part of the formula, which is why some game magazines list "Replay Value" alongside their metrics for "Graphics/Sound" and "Gameplay." Pull up the Gamespot review for Torchlight, and you'll see a little dollar sign on their "awards" for the game on the side, notifying the game as having a lot of value for the price you pay. It's certainly not the single most important attribute of a game, but it's well worth taking note of.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Don't pay for games.
What it is WORTH is what you can sell it for. The VALUE is the enjoyment you get out of it which is purely subjective. I was a game *freak* for over 10 years when I realized almost every hour spent pushing A A B A A was an hour of my life sucked away for ever. I sold over 400 games and every system I had and now spend that time doing things in the real world. That has more value to me than any game ever could, but then again, thats subjective.
I searched the thread and found no mention of the time suck negative, whereas if a game is awesome rocks, you get more than your money's worth hour-wise, but lose like 2000 hours of your life playing it. And flunk out of your PhD program. Statistics (on game's value hours/dollar) was never your strong suit.
value = $ / (enjoyment x hours)
I believe this would be the correct formula to determine what a game's worth, as only $/h is really a wrong metric for a something we don't enjoy.
But this leads to the real question: How can we measure how much we enjoy a game? We can replay a game and enjoy it the same the second time or just be bored as it gets repetitive. In the same way, we may not really enjoy level grinding because mechanics get repetitive during the first pass.
After many readings and discussions, my definition of "enjoyment of a game" is trying to find patterns in a game and establishing a strategy. The human brain is apparently good at this and "provides satisfaction" when finding a specific pattern. As long as I'm trying different things and as I'm not stuck in a local maxima I'm enjoying something because of the impression of improvement. For this reason, there are repetitive tasks that are classified as fun (like RPG level grinding) as long as there are patterns to be found (like finding the most efficien levelling path).
But it's not always directly related to pattern finding as much as "self improvement". A musical rhythm game has a duration of fun, as long as I have a feeling of improvement. So I had a lot of fun during the 2 first passes as I was getting better, but then started having similar scores for trying again, and it got less fun. So the net value would be cost/(2*game time).
As a counter example, in a racing game, there are less patterns to be found and less self improvement; yes, you can buy new/faster cars ingame but play the same level in the same conditions and you won't necessarily get better. That I would evaluate as (cost*2)/(game time).
The above examples are obviously totally arbitrary and I intentionally do not mention any game name as the values are different between individuals (unless you have the exact same learning rate as I do). But I hope it helps some of you clarify your metric of what's a game worth.
Replayability
Can I, after shelling out 50 bucks, play it multiple times through and still enjoy it?
This is one area where the original Deus Ex really excelled.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
What people are willing to pay for it. It's a brilliant system, really.
I think the flaw with the question is that it presumes money is rare and time is unlimited. Maybe they are if you're a kid living on a small allowance and killing time until you get a driver's license. But as a grown up I find that my time is the limiting factor. With more time I can earn more money. So with games costing tens of dollars, the time I spend acquiring, learning, and playing is worth far more dollar-wise than the game itself.
So the worth of a game is how much I enjoy playing it versus time spent on other activities. Elegance, depth of play, session length, and availability of opponents are the key factors for me. The game needs to look nice, feel nice, and respond smoothly to controls. It should be easy enough to learn in twenty minutes but sophisticated enough to reward years of replay. I should be able to complete a session in half an hour or generate stories and fond memories from sessions lasting two hours or longer. And it needs to have balanced computer opponents, readily available online opponents, or be easy to introduce to casual gaming friends.
I've played Mike Goetz' B03 version of CP/M Adventure (really Crowther & Woods's, with a few additions) on every computer I've owned since my Kaypro 10, thanks to emulation software. The original CP/M files cost nothing but download time (at 300 baud on a SmartModem, measured in hours, IIRC), and I've played them unmodified since 1984. On this repurposed Dell Inspiron 1525 running Jaunty Jackalope, I use the excellent YAZE emulator by Andreas Gerlich. Hilariously, this old text adventure runs an order of magnitude or two faster than it ever did running natively on the Kaypro.
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/cpm/cpm-advent-b03.zip
http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/users/ag/yaze-ag/
So, on the Scotch parsimony principle of cost benefit, Time Plaid divided by Cost, this one game is worth about 80 grillion pazools. Probably a universal principle; I've just spent January replaying every Star Ocean game ever released in English, and will move on to Blue Sphere (in Japanese on the GBC) shortly. After that, maybe FF12 again, who knows...? (What's a life for?)
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Time/Money is a poor metric for reasons many have posted. I think my formula is pretty decent. It is a pretty good approximation of my actual feelings about a game. Let f(t) be the function of fun over the course of a game. Let E be the constant that represents my average entertainment during my freetime (when I could choose to play a video game or not). Then the value of a game to me is the (integral on t of (f() - E)) / (cost of the game + small constant) + various bonus constants. These various constants tip the scales a bit but don't generally massively change the overall value. They include positive bonuses for: * Open Source * Cross Platform * "Independently" developed Games that have done very well by this metric: * Civilization I, II, IV, Alpha Centauri, the original Colonization * Half Life (original) + free Counterstrike and Day of Defeat mods * Dwarf Fortress (bay12games.com) * Company of Heroes * Starcraft and Warcraft II
Some games are worth playing just once, or twice, or thrice. But then, at some point, you might sell the game back. So your total cost for playing the game for however-many-hours is reduced by its sell-back price.
Some games you might choose to rent instead of purchase. Or borrow from a friend.
My point is, the "worth" of a game to a person is a sticky subject, because the idea is useless without contrasting it to a method of actual payment for the game. Analysis of F2P MMOs with cash shops gets even more confusing.
How to get the most gaming for your dollar? Use your best judgement and common sense, and whatever you do, don't ask slashdot: you'll just end up with a slew of conflicting responses and differences of opinion. ;)
No game is worth more than $20.00. Same for any computer software. And $20.00 is for the very best game or software. the worth drops off quickly for the mediocre crap that most games and software for sale today turn out to be. Mostly I have found free software and games to be worth more that whats for sale. Good example: Smokin Guns. A free game that is more fun most of the games you would pay $50.00 or more for.
Tired of crappy games that are clones of ones you are already bored with? Tired of paying through the nose for mediocre software? Vote with your wallet!!!!!!
This would measure the worth of an uninspired grindfest, obtained for $0.01, to be great, even if it's a waste of time to play.
I love this question as it is one I've thought about a few times. I'm not much of a gamer, so my "take" on this question is probably vastly different than a person who loves playing games. For the most part, I think games (especially video games) are an unproductive waste of time. Having said that, I understand that we all need some down time in order to enjoy life. While I prefer to spend my down time doing things that are every bit as unproductive as playing games, I do, nonetheless, play a game from time to time.
My favorite game of all time is Magic: The Gathering. I go through very long periods where I don't play at all (i.e. years), but I still have my card collection and I still get really addicted to it from time to time. I treat all my cards with care so that they will retain as much value as possible should I ever decide to sell my collection. (I keep all my cards in protective sleeves, and I store them away from sunlight.) The game can be very expensive over time because some rares (especially the newer mythic rares) can cost as much as a video game for 1 single card. On the other hand, you can get hours/weeks/months and even years of play out of a $9 pre-constructed deck.
For my time & money, there's no better game.
As far as electronic video games go ... I find it very difficult to get *any* value out of them at all. Video games bore me to tears. I would generally rather read a book, clean the house, surf the web, watch a movie, or do just about any other non-productive thing than play video games.
Having said that, there is one video game that comes to mind that I have gotten tremendous value out of. StarCraft. I bought the SC/Broodwar Battle Chest like 10+ years ago and I think I only paid $29 for it. But in the last 10 years, I have played that game off and on many, many times. In fact, about 2 months ago I got the urge to play it again ... so I got my discs out, installed it, patched it, and played several games for a period of about 5 days. It was great fun ... and I'm probably done with it for another year or two.
But the fact that this game from the late 90's is still working on modern hardware and modern operating systems is a true testament to the value that you can get from some games.
I value my time as much as my money. Some games have very boring periods and frankly there's better things I could be doing with that time, so I see an opportunity cost there - the section actually makes the game less valuable, despite adding time. I'd pay good money to never have to watch that Indiana Jones crap again.
Economists use utility in an attempt to quantify satisfaction, though most concede it's almost meaningless to do so in practice so they'll go with preferences when possible (preference, i.e. "more utility than the other" is reasonably reliable, trying to quantify how much more is nigh impossible).
It's even more complicated than that though. you can't necessarily just sample the best bits, or cut out the worst bits, and arrive at more entertainment per hour. With any story the whole should be much more than the sum of it's parts.
If there's an economic question, it's when you don't have enough funds to buy all the current systems or all the well-rated games for any system. Even if a particular game gave a lot of enjoyment per dollar, you can't buy the same game again to get that enjoyment all over; you must buy a different game to get more enjoyment. Even if the next game doesn't give as much enjoyment per dollar, it's still more than you were getting from the previous game at that point.
When I was younger I used to use the $$PerHour measure for a lot of things, but now that I've gotten older and I have more money than I did before I find I use it less and less. These days I am much more willing to spend more money on a game or a good meal or a night out since using/wasting $50 isn't the end of the world.
Using a $$PerHour makes the assumption that a $ to everyone is the same. Maybe if you were to divide it again by your hourly pay rate? ($$PerHour / $PayRate)
Time spent playing is not a good measure IMHO:
"One example that Blow cites is World of Warcraft, which he labels "unethical", stating that such games exploit players by using a simple reward-for-suffering scheme to keep them in front of their computer. In his view, developers need to think about what reinforcement the games are providing players when they reward them for performing certain actions." - Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame)
If I buy the game, it will be in my collection for a long long time. I buy to collect and replay. ;-)
Here's the formula:
Real worth = (abs(cost_of_game)+(hours_spent_playing * player's_normal_hourly_wage)) * (-1)
Think about that the next time you are boasting to your friends how you are a level 69 dark elf and you just completed your 98th Quest for the Golden Eye of Ramos (or some other such nonsense)
I've been playing video games since the 70's.
I've played on almost every console system, and quite a few different computer systems.
And I base games off my enjoyment of them.
I play EQ2, have 2 accounts, I raid.
Lets see, i'm paying $30 a month for 2 accounts, and once i year it seems i have to buy the game over again (latest expansion, but they don't sell the expansions seperate anymore), so in 3 weeks, i'm shelling out $80 for the new expansion.
I also pay roughly $8 a month for some multiboxing software (with other benefits) for EQ2.
So $38x12 + $80 = It doesn't matter.
I get enjoyment out of it.
But now, Pc & console games are sucking in comparison. I download every new game that comes out (oh ya, I pirate) to check out, and very few, I mean, very few stay on my computer and get played, and those I generally (not always, but mostly) end up buying a copy.
Fallout 3, Need for Speed series. Games I enjoy playing and games I bought after pirating them because I enjoyed them.
I've spent too many years being a consumer of this industry to let it play it's bullshit games on me.
The truth is, most companies don't want their games pirated because they know if peeps don't spend money on them before trying, they won't afterwards.
But when everything comes down to it. It's never about money, it's about enjoyment.
Like Dragon Age. I didn't enjoy the game. I was into the story at first, but after make a bunch of chars and doing the beginnings with them, I realised the game was a railroad ride for the most part. It would give you a yes or no choice. but if you hit no, it would just give you the choices over again. I mean, wtf? How is that choice? Then the game taking me 5 hours to complete.
Maybe i'm spoiled by Nes and Snes (and genesis too!) rpg games that took weeks to months to finish. Shesh, even the original SWKOTOR & it's sequel's storylines where a lot longer then that. Plus you had choice.
Only the stupid executives for the companies who make the games thinks in dollars. Which is why the budget for the games are getting bigger, and what you get when you buy it is smaller. Now they think they can package crap up in DLC's to drain more money out of you.
Sorry, if the game isn't enjoyable, you ain't getting any money out of me.
Be seeing you...