How many hours is worth the money?

[Queen of Hamsters]

If I can get through a game in 12 hours when it cost me 60 euros, I've spent my money badly.

I buy strategy builder games, sub to MMORPgs and games with great replay value. Got 500+ hours into Banished, countless hours /played in WoW/GW2, 418 hours into Anno 1800, 300 hours into RDR2 etc.

I can enjoy games that I play once for 12 hours, but I've never had one cost me 60 euro. I wait for sales, or the games are indie produced and low in price to begin with. I'd have 1000+ hours into Banished at this point if it wasn't so woefully bad in performance once you reach 2000+ citizens.

[Shakzor]

Can't go with any of these measurements. Games like Monster Hunter World i paid full price and played like 600 or more hours, whereas i also paid full price on smething like Astral Chain with "only" like 10-20h but in both cases i think i got my moneys worth.
Depends on your enjoyment imo, cause if you pay 5 bucks but finished in an hour and think "wtf was that crap..." then you'd probably still feel like you paid too much

[BeepBoo]

Imagine trying to attack someone for their attention span just because they don't want to spend large chunks of time on one video game.

Who, exactly, started the shit talking war in this? "Who wants to stick with the same thing for 100 hours?" The implication being "what kind of person plays games for a long time?" said in a snarky voice. At least, that's the connotation every time I've heard someone say anything like that *ever*.

Any time someone questions "why would someone do that?" It's out of ego because they think their way is better. No one ever genuinely questions others' motives out of naïve curiosity.

If the poster I replied to had worded it in a purely personal preference way, i.e. "I prefer short games" or even just excluding everything after their first sentence, I wouldn't have attacked them back.

[BeepBoo]

Or maybe you have a chip on your shoulder and see "attacks" everywhere? Who even sees an opinion on gameplay length as an attack?

Your last sentence is really telling. "I wouldn't have attacked them back." as if you were personally assaulted. You hadn't even posted in the thread, and you're immediately taking something as a personal attack?

Nah, don't question others' motives.

"Who likes MEN?"
"Who likes blue?"
"Who actually does that?"
etc. It's always the same thinly veiled "my view is better"

If you don't think so, then you're extremely naïve.

To your other point, I do the same thing in every thread: click on it with the intent to respond to the OP, peruse some of the most recent pages, and multiquote them. I include my own opinion after responding because quotes end up auto-populated in the form and I'm not going to be bothered with padding them down or inserting my initial reply ahead of them.

[Stardrift]

It's not about the number of hours. What a miserable metric for fun and value that would be. Is a movie better just because it's longer?

Some long movies are a lot better for being longer. Meaning it doesn't have most of its material cut to help attention deficit people digest the film better.

This way, it gets released in the director's original vision. All the scenes are there to make everything make sense. Otherwise you're just forced to chop off entire key segments to the movie just to reduce the film time.

Also, there's also the issue with there being games that are really really good but end up being short as hell. This leaves audiences wanting more, especially since they spent $60 on it. This would dock points from reviews for the game. It would also dock overall enjoyment from players.

[Ealyssa]

Time is irrelevant, I pay for a great experience.
If I get the best 6 hours single player story ever. I will happily pay the full 60$ for it.

Just like the duration of a movie isn't its selling point. Long or short, a good movie is good. A bad one is bad. Just like a good video game is good no matter its gametime.

Obviously you would always want more of what is good. But it doesn't change the quality of what you got.

[Stardrift]

That really wasn't the question at all, though.

"Is a movie better just because it's longer?"

Also, I made an edit and I think you missed it. I just tacked on an extra paragraph.

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Also, there's also the issue with there being games that are really really good but end up being short as hell. This leaves audiences wanting more, especially since they spent $60 on it. This would dock points from reviews for the game. It would also dock overall enjoyment from players.

[Daedius]

20 hours

[Weeps]

However long it takes to make a game feel complete and well done. It could be 1 hour, it could be 1,000.

If it is well done, it'll be worth the money.

Civilization games for me, easily worth triple the money they sell it for.
Current state of wow, $15 a month? Eh. I find myself playing less and less.

[Kathandira]

How many hours would you say is worth the money from a game?
Say you buy a AAA game for 60 EUR/USD, how much time playing the game would you say, "This was worth the money"?
Also, do you expect less game time when paying less, say an Indie game or any cheaper game from a big company?

EDIT: The reason i picked Time as a unit here is because it's a generic, adding gameplay, graphics etc, alot of it comes down to personal preferences. While if you measure it in time, you can see a bit more general overview. Say you read a review of a game from someone playing it for 10 minutes and saying the game sucks. Compares to someone playing it for 2 hours or more claiming it sucks. Which opinion would you trust more? Maybe the beginning is really bad, but it becomes better etc.

Also, you are paying say 60 EUR/USD for a game, which you would have spent real hours trying to earn, so kinda wondering if you spend 6 hours getting the money, how much hours do you expect in return from a game then. Hope this answers why i picked Hours and not anything else to measure it

My minimum is 20 hours for indie games, and 40 hours for full price games.

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I think games should be shorter and cheaper. Who wants to stick with the same thing for 100 hours?

The entire RPG Fan Base. And likely the Shooter and Sports fan bases as well. And of courses, the MMO fan base will easily sink more than 100 hours into their chosen game. Example, I had over 300 Days played time in WoW on just my Druid alone.

[Lord Pebbleton]

My rule is 1 euro = 1 hour. So if a game costs 30 euro, I expect it to last 30 hours. And also to be fun, of course.

Of course this is very rough, as a game like Minecraft lasts as long as you want it to, and a game like Uncharted 4, while good, doesn't even cover half the the arbitrary time measure. But I found this approach to be quite reliable overall.

[Koriani]

For me - if its a 60ish $ game - I'm expecting at least 35-40+ hours of quality content. 20 hours of main story and 20 hours of quality side quests is fine, but not 20 hours main/20 hours 'grinding' (fetch/carry quests, achievement hunting, type grinding). If that's where the 'main hours' of content come from (achievement or repetitive grinding) then I may never bother to buy the game - at any price; but I'll definitely wait for a huge sale.

For lesser cost games - from any developer (don't care) - then I'm ok with less 'real content'. If the game 20$ or less (full price) then I'm expecting 10 hours-ish of 'real' content. If a game only has 4-6 hours of main story content, then it better be dirt cheap, REALLY good, or I just won't bother. A game isn't worth my money/time if its taking me less than 6 hours to finish; just not what I play games for. Not anything against those games, its just not my thing.

But for a full price 60+$ game - if it has less than 30ish hours of 'real content' then I don't bother until its at least on sale.

Single player games and mulitplayer to me are two different metrics here as far as time v. cost. I don't measure multi-player games (be they MMOs or Overwatch or COD or whatever) the same way. Depending on the game type they have all different price measurements (from an upfront cost vs. monthly fee vs. both vs. whatever). I can say I've never played an MMOG for less than 100+ hours - but that value is more determined by 'am I having fun this month then I'll pay the monthly price'.

Single player games are one shot purchases (and one time played only) so absolutely there's a definitive *minimum* expectation I have for the price tag. Everything has exceptions. =D

[Zuben]

No amount of hours justifies the full retail price for me these days; 20€ is my usual price ceiling. I only go above that if the game in question is something I especially look forward to. Say, Red Dead Redemption 2, I still haven't played it, but saw it on sale for 25€. That's a good price for it. I didn't grab it, because for the moment I still have many other games to play, not to mention I kind of want to experience RDR2 on a PS5 (that I don't yet have).

[Fencers]

Hours are irrelevant. Games are not inherently a value proposition.

[Nutri]

Tough to say. I've played games that lasted 20 hours and I wish lasted another 20, and I've played games for 5 hours and wished it was over already.

But to express something in hours, I'd say a singleplayer, non-replayable linear story game lastsing around 12 hours is good enough.

[Cattleya]

x hours, where x is a completely variable number depending on every aspect of the game

[Lex Icon]

hard to say until i've actually experienced them.
but normally the games i enjoy the most last me hundreds even thousands of hours.
so a 60$ price tag would be a non issue and some of them are even free.

when it comes to single player games though i find most value in game passes(pay for a month to play as much stuff as you can). as they often don't have much replayability for me so a full price doesn't seem worth it.

[Fluxoz]

The lower length a game is, the higher the quality of that game needs to be. As for what the minimum is, that's hard to say, I feel like it would be hard to avoid public backlash with a sub 10 hour game for full price.

[Zenfoldor]

Can't go by hours, have to go by quality. Time is relative. Each perspective is different. Each of us, if we stay alive, will spend 24 hours a day doing something.

Instead, one has to judge a videogame by how big a mark it made in one's memories, or how often one references it, or how important it is to that individual, when all the long, good, but forgotten videogames are long since trashed.

Does anyone remember how much they paid to see their favorite movie, or judge books by how many pages they have?

Instead of some arbitrary length standard, one should consider deciding on future games based on one's own personal taste, community suggestions, individual and trustworthy reviews, or at the very least, a broader set of metadata than "average time to completion for one trip through the single player campaign on normal."

I'm thinking of some games I might have missed, had I eliminated games based on something like this.

Braid
Resident Evil 2
Undertale
Inside
Symphony of the Night
Some of the Zelda games
MGS1 was perhaps a little longer than some listed, but still not as long as many games

That's just off the top of my head.

[Real2016]

After DOTA 2 even 10$ are hard to justify...

But again no one here will get it...