Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
This Bash quote is quite fitting here.
Not too long ago a read a terrible review of a game that was described as a "unimaginative knockoff of Fire Emblem". I rushed right out to buy it, and enjoyed it.
I think review scores are nearly meaningless; aggregate review scores even more useless. But accurate descriptions of the game, including mechanics, and comparisons to similar games... that is really valuable.
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.
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.
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.